Brazil’s federal government has released its eagerly awaited biennial report card on public schools, which shows that the districts the Lemann Foundation have been working with have made impressive gains over the past two years.
The IDEB test scores are the single most important benchmark of the quality of learning in Brazil. Every two years, they measure student achievement in Portuguese and Math. And the 2019 results indicate that the two major educational interventions supported by the Foundation, Formar and Educar para Valer, are spurring bigger, faster gains than the national average.
These are promising results for 1.3 million public school students who are now moving more quickly toward hitting the right educational milestones at the right age thanks to these programs.
EDUCAR PRA VALER
Led by the Associação Bem Comum and supported by the Foundation, Educar Pra Valer is inspired by the internationally renowned educational turnaround in Sobral, a poor city in Brazil’s arid northeast region. The program specifically focuses on city schools, offering free technical advice to municipalities to help them implement effective public management practices.
The districts supported by Educar para Valer advanced, on average, 5 times faster for primary school students and twice as quickly at the lower secondary school level in relation to the average of Brazil.
FORMAR
FORMAR is a partnership supported by the Lemann Foundation that reaches 27 large school districts throughout the country. These schools educate more than 1 million children, who live in a very heterogeneous set of realities, with a multitude of challenges of varying complexity.
In the FORMAR districts, children scored above the national average for Brazil. Primary school students advanced, on average, 3 times more than the average of Brazil, while students in lower secondary schools advanced 1.5 times faster.
These early results, which are a testament to the daily diligence of these educational networks whose members are the true heroes behind these achievements.
