Education spending in Brazil

Coming soon: the world’s priciest classrooms

Brazil’s lower house of Congress approved a National Education Plan for the next decade. It sets a target for public education spending at 10% of GDP by 2020, which would be the highest share in the world. According to the OECD’s latest issue of Education at a Glance, Denmark currently ranks first at 8.7%, with only a handful of other northern European countries above 7%. Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, had tried to get allies in Congress to keep the target to a still-extravagant 8%, but failed. The Senate is now considering the plan, and is considered unlikely to change the figure. After that Ms Rousseff will have to choose between accepting the budget-busting target, or inviting opprobrium by vetoing it.

Brazil certainly is backwards in education. Though it does better than ten years ago in the OECD’s PISA studies, which test 15-year-olds’ literacy, numeracy and scientific knowledge and skills, it is still very near the bottom of the pack. But its problems do not stem from lack of money. Public spending on education is not particularly low, at 5.7% of GDP, and more generally its government consumes 36% of GDP, wildly out of line with other middle-income countries. Brazilians will often tell you they pay taxes like Europeans, and get African public services in return.

I asked Barbara Bruns of the World Bank, who recently wrote a book about education in Brazil, what she thought would be the result of almost doubling education spending. Here’s what she said:

A strong social consensus in favor of improving education is never a bad thing, so this legislation has a positive side. But there is no shortage of global evidence showing that spending more on education guarantees nothing. Focusing on results per unit of spending—which currently vary a lot across different states and municipalities—is a much smarter first step. Exploiting the decline in the school age population—which offers the potential for major increases in teacher salaries over the next few years—is a smarter second step.

When those gains are in the bag, increasing the share of GDP spent on education could be the icing on the cake. But doing those things in reverse order only guarantees higher costs and ultimately—since no country can afford to spend infinitely on education—less progress towards world class education.

Ms Bruns has a much better idea for improving schooling in Brazil: spending smarter, not more.

Brazil has one of the world's best systems for monitoring education results, and so it's ahead of a lot of other countries in being able to track how it is doing. It also has a lot of very dynamic state and municipal education systems. The share of GDP Brazil currently spends on public education is already relatively high, compared with OECD and other developing countries. Spreading the lessons of where that spending today is producing results will be the most powerful driver for future improvement.

 Fonte: The economist