Private schools perform poorly internationally – 04/10/2024 – Education

Many Brazilian families look to private schools as a way to guarantee better educational opportunities for their children, but this alternative is not always a guarantee of learning. Recent international assessments have confirmed that the country’s overall educational performance is below average not only in the public but also in the private system.

Figures from the most recent edition of the International Student Assessment Program (Pisa) showed that, although Brazil managed to get through the pandemic without worsening its grades in mathematics, reading and science, Brazilian students remained stagnant at very insufficient levels of learning and well below the international average.

The assessment carried out in 2022 indicated a below-average performance across all income groups: not even the richest students or private schools reached the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.

Does this mean paying for education – a sacrifice and goal for so many Brazilian families seeking social mobility – is not a guarantee of quality? DW consulted experts and listed five factors that help understand the issue.

1. What Pisa shows about private schools

Carried out every three years with students aged 15 in 81 OECD member and partner countries, Pisa provides a global dashboard of student learning in basic education. In the 2022 edition, the focus was on mathematics.

The objective is to assess whether, at 15 years of age, close to the end of compulsory education in many countries, students have already learned enough to be full citizens.

In Brazil, 10,798 students from 599 schools underwent the assessment; of these, 1437 (or 14.2%) were from private schools. The majority of Brazilian participants represented in Pisa 2022 were from the public network: state, (73.1%), followed by municipal (10.3%) and federal (2.5%).

While Brazil’s overall average score was 379 in mathematics, 93 points below the OECD average of 472, private schools scored 456 points. Better than the country’s average, but still below the international average.

Not even the richest students in Brazil reached the OECD average in mathematics. They were worse than students with a similar profile in countries like Türkiye and Vietnam, who scored more than 500 points.

2. Pandemic got in the way

Private schools hold a relatively small share of basic education in Brazil. Of the 47.3 million enrollments registered in 2023, 9.4 million (19.9%) were in the private system. In secondary education, private schools represent 13%.

The low representation perhaps helps to explain the scarcity of academic work on the quality of private education: the vast majority of research refers to public education.

Researcher Ocimar Munhoz Alavarse, PhD in education from the University of São Paulo (USP), is an exception: for decades he has been dedicated to interpreting statistics from teaching assessments, such as Pisa and the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb), to understand what is beyond the indicator averages.

Coordinator of the Study and Research Group on Educational Assessment at the Faculty of Education at USP, Alavarse says that the current PISA reflects students out of school during the pandemic. “It impacted everyone, but private schools continue to have better average results.”

Not even middle and upper class families, says the professor, were ready for remote education. “Many also didn’t have two or three computers in their homes, when their father and mother also worked at home”, he says, pointing out that, obviously, the situation was more serious for low-income families.

Schools were also unprepared. “It’s one thing to eventually resort to these resources [tecnológicos]; It’s another thing to transfer something that has been done for 200 years, which is face-to-face teaching, to the computer”, says Alavarse.

3. Influence from outside the school

Pisa’s structure allows students of the same socioeconomic level from different countries to be compared. According to the OECD, socioeconomic status was responsible for 15% of the variation in mathematics performance in Pisa 2022 in Brazil, the same level as the OECD.

“All research reaffirms: the higher the student’s socioeconomic level, the higher their performance tends to be”, says Alavarse. Schools in high-income neighborhoods, for example, naturally tend to perform better than socially vulnerable areas.

Not because of merit, but because of social injustice. Students with better conditions already start the “race” with advantages: the mother’s level of education, the family’s engagement in studies, the books and stimuli that the child has at home, the feeding conditions, health: everything that helps or hinders the student in their studies, for example.

4. Private schools are very different from each other

Contrary to what common sense might assume, it is not possible to treat all private schools as the same group. “One thing is the elite schools in the main capitals, which cost R$5,000, R$6,000, R$15,000 per month. And there are schools that we call neighborhood schools, which serve an audience between C and D, and they end up being left in limbo”, explains pedagogue and master in education Beatriz Cortese, director of Cenpec, a non-profit organization that promotes equity and quality in public education.

“On the one hand, they do not follow the regulation and care of public schools, which the government monitors, and on the other hand they do not have the same structure as private ones”, adds Cortese.

Pedro Flexa, director of the National Federation of Private Schools (Fenep), says that “in fact, the Pisa results attest that extracurricular factors have great importance.” He highlights, however, the positive impact that private schools can have for poorer families, contributing to society.

José Antonio Figueiredo Antiório, president of the Union of Educational Establishments in the State of São Paulo, says that there are many schools with very low tuition fees that are not even regularized. “A very serious problem that we are trying to solve,” he highlights.

5. Many students learn less

Even if the “photo” of private education is prettier, it doesn’t mean that the majority of students learn. Alavarse cites data from the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb) to show that, although private schools on average have better results than public ones, there is a large proportion of students who leave school unprepared.

He cites Saeb 2021, which shows that, among 9th grade students assessed in mathematics, 50% did not learn what was expected. In the same comparison, in municipal schools this percentage was 87%, according to the specialist.

“Moral of the story: if I look at results [do Pisa e Saeb]Yes: the results are higher than in public schools. But there is also a huge number, half of the students, who do not reach what would be expected”, he says.

Comparing to the European standard sought in Pisa, he estimates that the average of private schools in Brazil would be equivalent to the average of the lowest socioeconomic levels in the OECD. But it is a fact that, for the top performing students, the standard is better. “There is a small portion of private school students who perform similarly to Switzerland”, says the USP professor.

Although he says that the concept of school quality may vary according to the family – some want performance in the Enem, others more emotional skills, for example –, Alavarse warns that, depending on the school and the dreams of each person, many may not be getting what is expected when paying the monthly fee.