Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Miami Herald
March 27, 2008

Latin America is doing better but still not good enough. One reason lies in the quality of its labor force and its schools.

A good education lies at the heart of a virtuous circle: rising skills, promoting growth and reducing poverty. Governments, the private sector and civil society need to act faster than has been the case to bolster the region’s educational systems.

• Latin America no longer offers low-cost labor to attract investors. Elsewhere, middle-income countries — the range where most in the region fall — provide other incentives such as a growing pool of highly skilled workers, which Latin America lacks.

• Without quality improvements, the region’s expanding school enrollments won’t attract the investments to grow faster and compete. Studies show that quality — especially in student achievements in math and science — is at least as important, if not more, than enrolling and keeping children in school.

• Inferior educational systems aggravate Latin America’s income inequality, already the worst in the world. For the most part, only the children of the rich and the middle class complete secondary and higher education, which reinforces inequality while keeping most workers from living up to their potential. No wonder growth and social stability suffer.

Between 1960 and 2000, the average schooling of Latin America’s labor force doubled, albeit from the low base of three years. In a world rapidly moving to technologically advanced production and higher valued-added products, Latin America is still producing workers best suited for labor-intensive and raw-materials industries.

Inadequate systems

Secondary education presents the toughest climb. Latin America lags 19 percentage points behind the expected secondary-education performance for its income levels, while East Asian countries register almost 18 percentage points above theirs.

At first glance, Latin America meets the norm in higher-education enrollment. More than a quarter of university-age youths are enrolled, up sharply from the 16 percent of 1985, similar to the world average (24 percent) and well above East Asia (17 percent). These enrollments, however, are 10 percentage points below the expected given the region’s income levels; East Asia’s register 5 percentage points above. Most Latin American students never finish their university studies: Argentina (25 percent), Chile (33 percent), Colombia (50 percent) and Mexico (30 percent) are among the best.

”Inadequate, inefficient and inequitable” is how Jeffrey M. Puryear and Tamara Ortega Goodspeed label government educational investments in Latin America. Their article, Building Human Capital, can be found at www.thedialogue.org (click on publications).

Rich students subsidized

While on average increasing from 2.7 percent of GDP in 1990 to 4.3 percent in 2004, public spending on education varies considerably, from $190 per primary-school student in Nicaragua to $1,450 in Chile. It is also inefficient. Grade repetition, absent or inadequate teachers and ineffective policy interventions to improve quality eat up considerable funds with little in return.

Latin American governments on average invest more than three times as much per student in higher education as in the primary grades, which means the education of rich and middle-class students is being subsidized at the expense of the poor. Current spending priorities are upside down.

Puryear and Ortega Goodspeed identify four educational challenges that Latin America must meet in order to compete today.

• Quality: Even affluent and middle-class students in primary and secondary education underperform in international math and reading tests.

• Equity: The best-off 20 percent in the 21-to-30 age cohort has up to seven more years of schooling than the bottom 20 percent.

• Science and technology: All Latin American children lag in computer and other technological skills. Only 1 percent of Uruguayan students — the region’s best performers — register at the top levels in math.

• Teaching: Teachers are rarely evaluated, performance is not rewarded and standards largely nonexistent.

Schools must be made accountable, which now mostly are not. Puryear and Ortega Goodspeed rightly note that accountability is a technical and a political challenge. Establishing standards, generating reliable information about what works, rewarding teacher performance, empowering schools, parents and communities and providing adequate funding won’t be easy.

Failure, however, would mean a Latin America that runs in place only to fall even farther behind.