Culture of the ‘best student’ harms students in Brazil? – 12/19/2023 – Education

Education in Brazil is not designed to guarantee the success of all students, but to privilege those who are considered the “best” students.

This is the conclusion of pedagogue Ocimar Munhoz Alavarse, professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of São Paulo (USP) and coordinator of the Study and Research Group on Educational Assessment (Gepave).

He calls this stance “Olympic thinking,” because certain students would be educated to be “champions”—as if education were an Olympics—while the needs of the majority of students would be left aside.

As a consequence, says Alavarse, the “best students” receive more attention, encouragement and praise to enhance their development, while students with more difficulties are left behind.

“We have to think about whether we want to graduate four or five brilliant students or whether we want to ensure that all students are able to reach a certain minimum level of skills”, says the researcher.

“It’s a choice: which model do you want?”

This difficulty in guaranteeing a minimum level for everyone is one of the portraits shown by the 2022 Pisa results, the main global education exam, released this month.

Pisa showed that 70% of Brazilian students did not demonstrate that they had the minimum skills in Mathematics.

This means that most students cannot solve simple calculations and equations or apply their knowledge to real-world situations, such as comparing distances.

Around 50% did not reach the minimum level in reading and around 55% did not have the minimum expected skills in science.

Alavarse says that, although “Olympic thinking” is not officially part of an educational policy, it is something deep-rooted and quite common in the behavior of many teachers, principals, school managers and politicians.

“Of course, in official documents no one takes a selective approach to schooling, but everyone who has ever been in a teacher’s room knows that there is always what is considered a ‘good student'”, he states.

“There are always those who believe that school is about choosing the best.”

An example would be public policies that reward teachers according to the good results of their students, according to the researcher.

“It’s a completely wrong idea,” he says, “because it doesn’t make sense to demand performance from teachers without providing the minimum working conditions and structure.”

For education researcher Romualdo Portela de Oliveira, director of research and evaluation at the educational NGO Cenpec, this type of “bonus for results” policy can accentuate inequalities.

This is because it ends up directing more resources to schools that are already performing well and have more financial and infrastructure support.

Special attention is needed to this problem in public education, he says, where more than 80% of Brazilian students are today.

However, this logic also exists in private schools, according to experts.

It is not uncommon, for example, for them to choose the best students to participate in external assessments, create special advanced teaching rooms or publish rankings with students’ grades in tests and entrance exam simulations.

Pedagogue Vera Lúcia da Costa Antunes, pedagogical coordinator of the Course and Colégio Objective, argues, however, that separating students into classes with different levels of skills in different areas is, in fact, a way of meeting everyone’s individual needs – something which can be done, according to her, from high school onwards.

“When they reach high school, the student themselves make demands. There are students who find it easy to learn, who demand more, who want more depth in a subject”, he states.

“What we cannot do is leave other students aside, we need to work on the needs of those who have difficulty, give special classes, encourage them. But having after-school classes to go deeper is precisely a way of meeting each person’s needs”, he says she.

Antunes says that students who find it easy in some areas may have difficulties in others. She argues that this division of classes helps to discover these skills and difficulties. And it allows students to have more personalized service.

The pedagogue, however, recognizes that not all schools have the resources to create extra classes – and says that, when there is a single class, the school should not only meet the needs of the most advanced.

According to her, if they are handled correctly, competitions can be positive for students.

“I had a student with very low self-esteem who started to shine after a competition, who felt encouraged and valued because she stood out in the artistic field.”

Sought by BBC News Brasil to comment on the matter, the Ministry of Education highlighted Minister Camilo Santana’s (PT) speech about Pisa in a press conference after the results were released.

The minister recalled that Brazil was practically stable in Pisa results despite the pandemic and what he called the “absence” of support from the previous government, President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), for the States.

“We are taking a series of measures to improve the quality of basic education,” stated the minister.

“To guarantee literacy for everyone at the right age, to guarantee full-time schooling, to guarantee the attractiveness of the school and to improve the quality and continued training of teachers.”

“All of our actions are focused on reducing inequality and including groups that often do not have access to school,” said Santana.

What is an assessment for?

Alavarse says a common misconception is to consider assessments themselves to be the root of the problem – which is not the case, he says.

The “Olympic” logic for education does not come from having tests, but from the way the results of these tests are read, he says.

“It is necessary that there are internal and external assessments – not to rank students or schools, but to properly understand what the needs are and to be able to define what pedagogical actions are necessary to guarantee everyone’s success”, he says.

For Alavarse, in the case of Pisa, for example, the important thing is not to look at where Brazil is positioned in the ranking in relation to other countries, but to understand how many students are demonstrating minimum skills in each area.

Both results show Brazil’s poor performance. Brazil ranked 65th in Mathematics among the countries of the Organization for Trade and Economic Development (OECD), with a score that was 93 points below the average of all countries evaluated.

The result that 70% of students did not reach the minimum skill level in Mathematics is more important, says Alavarse

Furthermore, Pisa shows that there is a large gap between the results of the most and least privileged socioeconomic groups.

The richest students scored an average of 77 points more in Mathematics than the less privileged group.

According to Alavarse, there is a certain naturalization in Brazilian educational culture that some students “simply won’t learn.”

If students are treated as if they were competing to form a ranking, there will always be the best and the worst.

“It’s a culture that naturalizes that certain students – because of their family background, their race, place of origin, socioeconomic level, etc. – will not learn as quickly or reach a desired level and will not complete the school cycles.”

The researcher argues that quality in education should be understood as “equality of results in the schooling process”, that is, that education should aim to ensure that there is not such a large disparity between the results of different students – at least in basic areas such as proficiency in Reading and Mathematics.

“In reality, this difference is absurd, Pisa shows this, but it is something that we have known for a long time, that other tests have already shown”, he says.

“At the end of a cycle in compulsory school, there should be no differences between its graduates.”

To achieve this, he states, the public education system needs to be organized in a way that schools can minimize differences and inequalities in students’ origins, which, in general, result in inequalities in school results.

“Research shows that the differences found at the beginning of the school process continue throughout the student’s educational life”, he states.

“Will this eliminate disputes in life, in the job market? Of course not. But at least it guarantees opportunities for everyone to start from the same level.”

This would also involve, he says, training so that teachers understand the content and criteria of assessments such as Pisa.

Not to teach with the test in mind, argues the teacher, but to understand what is important and what is considered basic knowledge for all students. “That is, what skills all students need to have,” says Alavarse.

“Today, most teachers don’t even know what these exams measure.”

Professor Romoaldo Portela de Oliveira, from Cenpec, points out that making the system more egalitarian necessarily involves increasing investment.

“For many years there has been a liberal discourse that we don’t spend little, but we spend badly. But that’s not true,” he says.

“There is a minimum investment level that we do not reach (in Brazil), a minimum investment to guarantee the system’s functioning conditions.”

Money alone “doesn’t solve” the problem, says Oliveira.

“But it’s a necessary condition. If you take data from the school system, you see schools that don’t have sewage, don’t have air conditioning in 50ºC heat.”

According to Oliveira, the pedagogical debate is important, but it does not replace structural issues.

Alavarse argues that the two issues are not exclusive. In other words, there must be an increase in investment and a discussion about what we want for education.

“It is necessary to abandon the culture that accepts the success of those considered good and normalizes the low performance of others to one that has as its objective the success of all.”

This text was originally published here.