The Economist December 18th 2021 27
The AmericasEducationaftercovid-19
Studying Ceará
W
hen amaury gomesbegan teaching
history in Sobral in the mid1990s, its
schools were a mess. The city of 200,000
people lies in Ceará, a bakinghot north
eastern state that has one of Brazil’s high
est rates of poverty. When local officials or
dered tests in 2001 they found that 40% of
Sobral’s eightyearolds could not read at
all. Onethird of primary pupils had been
held back for at least a year. Staff were not
always much better, recalls Mr Gomes. He
remembers a head teacher who signed doc
uments with a thumbprint, because she
lacked the confidence even to scribble her
own name.
These days Mr Gomes is the boss of a lo
cal teachertraining college, and his city
gets visitors from across Brazil. In 2015 So
bral’s primaryschool children made head
lines by scoring highest in the country in
tests of maths and literacy, a milestone in a
journeybegun almost 20 years before. The
pandemic has thrust the city back into the
spotlight as a model for educators seeking
to reboot schooling after lengthy closures.
In November ambitious officials from oth
er parts of Brazil trooped into Mr Gomes’s
college, the first group since the start of the
pandemic to attend one of the tours Sobral
offers to curious outsiders.
Success stories are important to Brazil’s
beleaguered educators, now more than ev
er. Before the pandemic only about half of
children could read by the time they fin
ished primary school, compared with
nearly threequarters in other uppermid
dleincome countries. In 2017 the World
Bank warned that it could take 260 years
before Brazil’s 15yearolds are reading and
writing as well as peers in the rich world.
Since then many Brazilian pupils have
missed around 18 months of facetoface
lessons as a result of school closures (most
schools have now reopened). Few coun
tries kept classrooms shut for as long. Data
from São Paulo suggest that during this
period children learned less than a third of
what they normally would have, and that
the risk of pupils dropping out tripled.
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president,
seems to have no meaningful plan to get
teaching back on track. Even before co
vid19 his educational policies were mea
gre. He said he wanted more schools to berun by the army and for Congress to legal
ise homeschooling. Yet his chaotic ad
ministration has not made much progress
towards even these eccentric goals. It has
churned through four education ministers
in three years. There is one consolation,
says Priscila Cruz of All for Education, a
charity based in São Paulo. She thinks the
vacuum in the federal government is mak
ingmunicipal and state officials keener to
seek lessons from each other.
The success in Sobral has roots in re
forms begun in the late 1990s. In much of
Brazil, city governments appoint their
friends or political allies to serve as school
principals.Officials in Sobral insisted that
these jobs go only to candidates who could
win them on merit after competing in in
terviews and tests.
The city shut small schools in outlying
areas, where staff commonly taught chil
dren in several grades at once. Merging
them with bigger ones allowed more pu
pils to learn from Sobral’s best teachers,
and cut costs. This reorganisation has
helped keep spending per pupil below the
national average, according to the World
Bank (see chart on next page).
In the classroom, Sobral has focused
obsessively on making sure small children
can read. The city determined that every
pupil would master basic literacy before
entering the third grade (when they are
aged eight or nine). Examiners began lis
tening to all children in their first years of
school read aloud. These days local profes
sionals run citywide tests in maths andF ORTALEZA AND SOBRAL
What one state’s sprightly schools can teach Brazil, and the world
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