Lesson of Sao Paulo Reforms: Get the Public on Your Side

By Jeffrey Puryear
Published in the Dialogue's Latin America Advisor, April 14, 2008

Lessons of Sao Paulo Reforms: Get the Public on Your Side 

Originally published in Jeffrey Puryear’s monthly “Human Capital” column for the Dialogue's daily Latin America Advisor.

WASHINGTON, DC—Sao Paulo's state school system, already one of the largest in Latin America, now seeks to become one of the most innovative as well.

With five million students, 250,000 teachers, and 5,000 schools, the system's historically poor performance has affected a lot of children. For decades, Sao Paulo public schools have been plagued by political patronage, chronic teacher absenteeism, and a legal framework that stifles accountability and innovation. Student test scores, while among the highest of Brazil's 26 states, are still well below acceptable levels. Some 20 percent of fourth-graders cannot read or write, while nearly half of eighth-graders—and 70 percent of 11th-graders—fail to meet basic standards in math.

Sao Paulo's dynamic secretary of education, Maria Helena Guimaraes de Castro, aims to change that. After less than a year in office, she has introduced what may be Latin America's most ambitious set of school reforms. Among other measures, the reforms establish high education standards, set quality targets for each school, provide bonus pay for teachers whose students meet the targets, and offer intensive instruction for those who have fallen behind in math and reading.

Notably, a recent report by McKinsey & Co. indicates that many of these reforms are characteristic of those school systems that score highest in the OECD's PISA exam. They build demand for quality education, increase support for students and teachers, and reward merit and tackle failure quickly. A key goal, according to Guimaraes de Castro, is to "make schools feel responsible for students' results."

These are revolutionary words in Latin America. The fact that the secretary managed to get such fundamental reforms approved at all is remarkable. Quality and accountability have not traditionally figured strongly in organizing the region's public schools. They have assumed that their students—almost exclusively poor—are unlikely to do well and so have not set high expectations. Merit pay has sparked opposition from powerful teachers' unions who are accustomed to controlling compensation and see meaningful teacher evaluation as a threat.

But in Sao Paulo, consistently low scores on student achievement tests have changed public perceptions. Sao Paulo has one of the region's most sophisticated student assessment systems, testing the math and reading skills of every child in grades 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 11, and broadly disseminating the results. Parents receive individual reports on their children's progress, and school-by-school comparisons are publicly available via the Internet. This information, widely reported in the press, has stoked dissatisfaction and gradually built support among Paulistas for change.

Whether these reforms are successful will depend substantially on getting the details right and on firm implementation. But Sao Paulo's experience already offers at least one lesson to policy entrepreneurs: getting the public on your side makes fundamental education reform easier. Countries that document persistently low student performance and systematically communicate that information to the general public—and especially to parents—will sooner or later find a growing cadre of concerned citizens ready to support the major policy changes needed to improve education quality.


Jeffrey Puryear is Vice President for Social Policy at the Inter-American Dialogue and Co-Director of the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL).