03/12/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 03/12/2024 12:29
When it comes to education, there's no time to waste. The latest results from the 2022 PISA tests revealed a profound learning crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean, where three out of four students do not achieve basic levels in mathematics. The solutions to overcome this education crisis exist. This blog post presents a path forward with proven solutions to tackle the learning gap. It is based on a presentation given during the Annual Meetings of the Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank, where ministers and experts explored ways to scale up these solutions as a critical priority to reduce regional poverty and inequality. Because learning can't wait.
Why do children die? Twenty-five years ago, Bill Gates became obsessed with that question. And he had a good reason: in 2010, 10% of children under five years old died.
We knew where and why children were dying:
We knew the where and why, and we also knew the solutions. Some had already been invented, but there was an access problem. They were too expensive or did not reach the places where they were needed. This was the case, for example, with oral rehydration solutions for diarrhea.
But other solutions had not yet been invented. In those cases, scientists set out to develop them. This is the case with the rotavirus vaccine.
What was achieved? In less than 30 years, child mortality was reduced by half.
Now, I'll refer to another global challenge: learning.
The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) published the results of PISA 2022 in December last year. Those results showed a global crisis in learning.
What happened in Latin America and the Caribbean? We saw that three out of four 15-year-old students lack basic skills in mathematics, and almost half do not understand what they read.
If learning were a disease, we would be talking about a global pandemic.
We partnered with the World Bank to publish the report Learning Can't Wait: Lessons for Latin America and the Caribbean from PISA 2022. We sought to better understand the reasons behind this learning crisis in the region.
[Link]And, just as with child mortality, we know where and why.
Also, in low-and middle-income countries, on average, 15-year-old students in the region lag five years behind the average student in OECD countries. If we compare Latin American and Caribbean countries with those above the OECD average, the gap is 12 years of learning compared to Singapore, which leads the PISA rankings.
We not only know where the learning crisis is located and in which countries these learning challenges exist, but we also know who the lagging students are within countries.
There is an enormous inequality in learning by socioeconomic status: 88% of low-income students underperform in mathematics, compared to 55% of the wealthiest students. That's a difference of more than 30 percentage points between the two groups.
We not only know where, but we know why:
Just as in the case of child mortality, we know where; we understand why. And we also know the solutions that work.
We know the magnitude of the problem. We have studied it in depth. We know where the problem lies and why we are facing this challenge. And we also know the effective solutions. We have done it before; we can do it again. The main challenge is how to transform the region's education systems at scale. Because learning can't wait, these generations of children and youth cannot wait.