Latin America must be supported in efforts towards greater education quality

Great strides have been made in the past two decades in access to education throughout Latin America, but the majority of children in the region are still not receiving a high-quality and relevant education. As a result, too many Latin American youth entering the labor force lack the skills necessary to find dignified work and participate in an increasingly competitive, information-rich and globalized economy. At the same time, employers cannot find enough qualified people to fill open positions. This profound human resource mismatch is suppressing economic growth and perpetuating a system of haves and have-nots. Unequal societies are less efficient at converting growth into poverty reduction. In Latin America, the education gap mirrors the income gap existing between rich and poor.

Latin America is falling behind other regions of the world with respect to years of school and quality of schooling. In 2015, Latin America is, on average, 2.5 years of schooling behind the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average. Asian countries, like South Korea, had similar, if not worse, educational levels than many Latin American countries 50 years ago. Approximately 50% of Mexicans, Colombians and Brazilians do not have the skills necessary to solve simple math equations or to explain basic scientific phenomena. This is equivalent to a loss of two years of schooling. In the 2015 PISA exam, the gap widened even further to the equivalent of three years loss in schooling. Perhaps even more surprising, only a tiny sliver (well under 1%) of Latin American students score at the top level of international exams; even Latin America’s high-income students perform below their international peers, not just Latin America’s poor. Less than 0.1% of students in Brazil performed at the highest level in science and Brazil’s performance has remained unchanged since 2006 OECD.

(Available: https://educando.org. PISA, 2015. Adapted.)