38 | Achieving World-Class Education in Brazil: The Next Agenda
of poor households. Progressive municipal education secretaries are developing ways to link the program with direct actions to ensure that children in poor households have access to adequate health screening, nutrition, and cognitive and social stimulation from birth. We discuss some of the most promising approaches in the next section. Access to ECE services remains highly constrained for the lowest income groups in Brazil, but it will be crucial for long-term progress in raising the educational attainment of poor children.
Remediating Learning Gaps: Helping Kids Catch Up Children from low-income families are by no means the only students with learning disabilities, attention deficits, and physical or emotional issues that can challenge teachers. But the poorest children are more likely to either start school behind in learning or fall behind. Brazil has an entrenched tradition of making slow learners repeat grades. In the next section, we assess this policy from an efficiency standpoint; here we focus on the equity implications. National household survey (PNAD) data reveal that it takes children from the lowest income quintile, on average, three extra years to complete primary school. They have the lowest primary and secondary school completion rates, because the opportunity costs of remaining in school grow with each year of repetition until they are prohibitive. Brazil’s high rates of grade repetition and the age-grade distortion they create have no parallel in the OECD world or elsewhere in Latin America. Only a handful of francophone African countries repeat students at Brazil’s high rate. A large amount of the program innovation going on in Brazil today— much of it supported by influential foundations—is aimed at developing effective remedial learning programs. One of the largest scale efforts is the Reforço Escolar launched by Rio de Janeiro municipality in 2009, which tests all children before the school year and provides two weeks of intensive tutoring to those who are not at grade level. In 2010, the program provided special math and reading reinforcement to more than 200,000 students. In 1995, the state of São Paulo—in collaboration with the nonprofit foundation CENPEC (Centro de Estudos em Pesquisa Educação e Ação Comunitária)—developed an accelerated learning program (Programa de Correção de Fluxo) for the first cycle of basic education, targeted at students with high age-grade distortion (see Reali et al. 2006). The following year, the state of Paraná worked with CENPEC to expand the program into the second cycle of basic education.