As you approach the city of Sobral in northeast Brazil, the road worsens. Huge potholes slow traffic to a crawl. The heat is suffocating, even worse when there is no cloud cover.
Sobral is poor. Jobs are scarce, salaries meager, with gangs the only option for many. For children, it is a tough start to life.
Ana Farias, headteacher of an early-years school in a low-income neighborhood controlled by a gang, knows this only too well.
Some of her students would not eat if it were not for free school meals.
Farias and her colleagues often hear stories of home life; some children have to accompany their mothers who sell sex at night.
“It’s a challenge, but it motivates me to be here every day. We want to make a difference in their lives,” she said.
This is one of the last places anyone would expect would be a paragon of educational excellence. Yet, Sobral has gone through an extraordinary metamorphosis and is now the best place in Brazil to get a state education.
The city comes top of 5,000 districts in Brazil’s education development index. Fifteen years ago, it was ranked 1,366th.
Since 2015, literacy rates have risen from 52 percent to 92 percent, and the number of families living in extreme poverty has declined by 89 percent.
This is a stunning turnaround in a country beset by income inequality and poor literacy rates: Half of state-educated students are still illiterate by the third grade.
So what has been Sobral’s secret to success?
“We have reached this position because this is a 23-year-old project that has surpassed changes in mayors and secretaries of education,” Sobral Mayor Ivo Gomes said.
“People think it’s magic and it’s not. It is persistence and a lot of hard work,” he added.
In 1997, the movement to improve education in Sobral began with renovating school buildings and furnishing them with computers and other resources. Public spending on education was boosted.
In the past, politicians had commonly rewarded allies by handing out government jobs, including headteacher posts to people who could barely read or write. This practice was stamped out.
There was a crackdown on truancy; today families are called if their children do not turn up to school.
Newly qualified teachers now undergo a preparatory internship and all teachers, regardless of experience, receive on-the-job training for a day each month. Every term there is a bonus system for teachers whose students perform well in assessments.
Student welfare is a high priority; pupils receive two free school meals a day and there are plans to hire a mental health professional in each school.
All this has led in part to the success of former students such as Chelton Santos, 22, and his sister Maria Santos, 20.
The siblings live with their parents and grandmother in a poor and dangerous area. The family have survived on one minimum wage — now US$258 a month — for many years.
“I grew up seeing gang fights,” Chelton Santos said. “I had to face poverty and violence. My parents took good care of us, but we had financial difficulties and had to take out loans.”
Despite a difficult upbringing for the pair, the future is looking bright: Chelton Santos is studying law at university and his sister is working as an office clerk to save money to study medicine. They are determined to succeed.
“My dream is to be a doctor. I’m going to get there. I’ve seen my mother suffer with health problems since I was a child and now I want to help the poorest in society,” Maria Santos said.
Sobral’s success is now being replicated across the country.
Former Sobral mayor Clodoveu Arruda, who oversaw a large part of the transformation in the education department, has teamed up with the Lemann Foundation to spread best practice.
So far they have worked in 25 municipalities across five states.
FRUSTRATIONS: One in seven youths in China and Indonesia are unemployed, and many in the region are stuck in low-productivity jobs, the World Bank said Young people across Asia are struggling to find good jobs, with many stuck in low-productivity work that the World Bank said could strain social stability as frustrations fuel a global wave of youth-led protests. The bank highlighted a persistent gap between younger and more experienced workers across several Asian economies in a regional economic update released yesterday, noting that one in seven young people in China and Indonesia are unemployed. The share of people now vulnerable to falling into poverty is now larger than the middle class in most countries, it said. “The employment rate is generally high, but the young struggle to
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
ENERGY SHIFT: A report by Ember suggests it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power, such as coal and gas, even as demand for electricity surges Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, a new analysis said. Global solar generation grew by a record 31 percent in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew 7.7 percent, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight yesterday. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than the increase in overall global demand during the same period, it said. The findings suggest it is
TICKING CLOCK: A path to a budget agreement was still possible, the president’s office said, as a debate on reversing an increase of the pension age carries on French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday was racing to find a new prime minister within a two-day deadline after the resignation of outgoing French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu tipped the country deeper into political crisis. The presidency late on Wednesday said that Macron would name a new prime minister within 48 hours, indicating that the appointment would come by this evening at the latest. Lecornu told French television in an interview that he expected a new prime minister to be named — rather than early legislative elections or Macron’s resignation — to resolve the crisis. The developments were the latest twists in three tumultuous
RSS