Achieving World-Class Education in Adverse Socioeconomic Conditions

Abstract

This report presents the case of the municipality of Sobral in the state of Ceará, Brazil. This municipality overcame adverse socioeconomic conditions and now has the best primary and lower secondary education system in Brazil. Sobral is home to 200,000 inhabitants and in 2005 was ranked 1,366 in the national index that measures quality of education in Brazil. Twelve years later, it was ranked first among the 5,570 municipalities in both primary and lower secondary education rankings. Public education in Sobral has one goal: every student must complete lower secondary education at the right age and with appropriate learning. The municipality placed education at the top of the political agenda and kept it out of politics. It prioritized learning by establishing a clear intermediate target-ensuring all students are literate by the end of the second grade. It organized the education policy under four pillars: 1. Effective use of student assessment; 2. Focused curriculum with a clear learning sequence and prioritization of foundational skills; 3. Prepared and motivated teachers; 4. Autonomous and accountable school management with school principals appointed through a meritocratic and technical selection process. The main aspects of the reforms are presented and discussed in this report. 1 This version of the report benefited from comments made during a workshop with Sobral municipal government and World Bank colleagues in Sobral in February 2020, including the Mayor Ivo Gomes. We also would like to thank

System Coherence for Learning: Applications of the RISE Education Systems Framework

“…A key driver of Sobral's learning gains was the clear delegation of explicit learning goals by Sobral's mayor (Loureiro and Cruz, 2020;Crouch, 2020) and subsequent collective commitment to the goals (McNaught and Tami, forthcoming). In 2000-2001, an independent learning assessment conducted by the municipality revealed that 40 percent of primary school students could not read (Loureiro and Cruz, 2020).…”

A Problem-Driven Approach to Education Reform: The Story of Sobral in Brazil

“…Gomes' administration inherited an education system where many principals and teachers were hired based on political interests rather than meritocracy. One of the first reforms made by the municipal leadership in 1997 was to lay off 1,000 teachers who were hired without meeting the necessary technical requirements and to pass a law (Sobral Municipal Law 123, 1997) that defined technical criteria for hiring new teachers (Cruz and Loureiro, 2020).…”

“…Another important development that affected Sobral was the creation of FUNDEF, a federal education program which raised funds from federal, state, and municipal governments and redistributed them according to the number of student enrollment (Cruz and Loureiro, 2020). This gave an additional incentive to the municipality to increase enrolment and "between 1996 and 1999, student registration at the municipal network grew from 9,000 to 17,000" (Cruz and .…”

“…Everyone should know about this failure and should take responsibility for learning." (Cruz and Loureiro, 2020). The Secretariat of Education, including Ivo Gomes, the newly appointed Secretary of Education, held meetings with families to explain the problem and to gain support from parents to help their children learn.…”

“…In the inaugural results in 2005, 1,365 municipalities had a better score for primary education than Sobral. By 2017, Sobral made national news by ranking number one in the entire country for both primary and lower secondary education (Cruz and Loureiro, 2020). These results are even more impressive when considering that Sobral is located in the northeastern state of Ceará, which is the fifth poorest state in Brazil in terms of GDP per capita (Cruz and Loureiro, 2020).…”