Learning does not follow public investment in education – 05/05/2023 – Market

Basic education in Brazil consists of three major stages: early childhood education, primary education and secondary education. The question remains whether the name “medium”, which refers to the last stage of basic education, is appropriate and stimulating for the diploma of our young people aged 15 to 17 years.

In terms of investment, Brazil’s effort was anything but average for this stage. We’ve put a lot of effort into the past two decades.

Direct public investment in education per high school student (in 2018 values) increased from R$1,810 in 2005 to R$8,003 in 2019. We increased our investment per student by more than four times.

Unfortunately, math learning has not kept up with the financial effort. The proficiency of our students went from 261 points on the Saeb scale (Basic Education Assessment System, equivalent to a ruler that measures learning) in 2005 to 269 in 2019, an increase of 8 points. Adequate for this step is somewhere around 350 points.

In other words, we have increased our investment more than four times and we are stagnant with the learning of our youth. It’s like we vaccinated the entire population and the pandemic hasn’t regressed. We are still in the same place.

We need to understand in depth how resources were allocated in secondary education. It’s hard to believe we couldn’t have done better with the 300+% increase in resources.

What to do when the proposals of the last two decades have no impact on our results? Without a doubt, giving this problem the urgency it needs is the first step.

The Ministry of Education could and should convene our specialists in teaching, in the structure of incentives for education and in public policies for an emergency working group. As was done to discuss cases of violence in schools.

The role of this working group would be to make a new proposal to bring better learning to our students and better use of our resources.

Our luck is that this work group can start from successful experiences that we have within our own territory. We have Brazilian states that historically have the best internal results. Espírito Santo, Goiás, Pernambuco and Paraná are some of them. How are resources allocated in these territories? What are the policies for high school? Good internal references are not lacking.

Is the new high school a sufficient answer to this decades-long stagnation? Perhaps one of the important components. But beyond that, we need to push the red button, sound the alarm bells, ask for help, and call on our education experts to come up with a blunt, broad-spectrum response to this problem.

We’ve wasted too much of our youth already. A study by Insper with the Roberto Marinho Foundation points to a loss of BRL 395,000 per young person who does not complete high school. These are lost resources in terms of health, salary, productivity and a culture of peace. We have no right to continue to be less than average with our youth.