Brazil is Testing U.S. Education Policies Including Charter Schools and Pay-For-Performance - The Atlantic

Brazil is Testing U.S. Education Policies Including Charter Schools and Pay-For-Performance - The Atlantic:

Testing U.S. Education Policies in Brazil
The country has implemented a series of strategies including pay-for-performance and charter schools, modeled after the American system.

Tying teacher pay to student test scores. Creating public schools of choice with private operators. Setting common standards for all students. Those issues probably are familiar to any American reporter who covers education. They are also becoming more and more common in Brazil, where many policymakers are deeply inspired by the American experience.

The most widespread policy in Brazil that draws on the U.S. experience is paying performance bonuses to teachers based on students’ test scores. A study presented in August 2015 at the annual meeting of the Brazilian Association of Educational Evaluation showed that 13 of Brazil’s 27 states were already adopting some kind of pay-for-performance approach. Because big states in Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas and Pernambuco, have those programs, the majority of Brazilian students are now enrolled in school systems with this kind of policy. (Rio and São Paulo are the two biggest Brazilian cities and capitals of states with the same names.)

As in the United States, the debate over this subject is affected strongly by ideology in Brazil. In this case, the best an education reporter can do is look for empirical evidence on whether the programs are benefiting those who really matter in schools: the students.

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What makes the job for a Brazilian journalist harder is that we still have very few rigorous studies published on the topic. In fact, although this policy is already in place in half of Brazil’s states, only four studies have been published on the subject in my country. And they all show mixed results. Small gains in some areas, no visible results in others.

Because of the weak evidence in Brazil, it makes sense to look for international experiences, mostly in the United States, where more evaluations have been conducted. But again, it seems that there is no simple answer for such a complex issue, and we still don’t have sufficient evidence, even from the American experience, that those programs work. The latest study from Mathematica Policy Research, a U.S. research organization, finds a small gain in students’ reading achievement after two years of implementation of a pay-for-performance program, but in math the impact was not statistically significant.

There is no sign that the majority of Brazilian states will abandon their performance-pay programs. That makes it even more important for journalists to keep looking for evidence about how this policy works (or doesn’t), in Brazil, the United States, or other countries, without forgetting that the context and program details in each state or country matter a lot.

While we are still waiting for more evidence on performance pay, another hot topic in the U.S. context appears to be arriving in Brazil: charter schools. A growing number of Brazilian economists and education managers, often referring to the American experience, argue that we should experiment with giving public money to private organizations to run schools open to all children.

In the state of Goias (in the middle of the country, where the nation’s capital, Brasilia, is located), the governor announced in October that 25 percent of public schools will be run by private organizations. We still don’t know all the details about how this will work, as the local press is reporting that there is no consensus between the governor and the state secretary of education. The governor is pushing for an approach similar to the American charter school model: Schools operate under a contract that gives them some flexibility, such as in the hiring and firing of teachers, but with the obligation to meet certain academic Brazil is Testing U.S. Education Policies Including Charter Schools and Pay-For-Performance - The Atlantic: