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.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS