Sarah Johnson - 'People think it's magic': how one of Brazil's poorest cities gets its best school results
The children of Sobral have overcome
disadvantage to top 5,000 districts. Now their success is being replicated
across the country
As you approach the
city of Sobral in north-east Brazil, the road worsens.
Huge pot holes slow traffic to a crawl. The heat is suffocating, even worse
when there is no cloud cover. Sobral is poor. Jobs
are scarce, salaries meagre, gangs the only option for many. For children, it’s
a tough start to life.
Ana Farias, headteacher of an early-years school in a
low-income neighbourhood controlled by a gang, knows this only too well. Some
of her students wouldn’t eat if it were not for free school meals. Farias and her
colleagues often hear stories of home life; some children have to accompany
their mothers who sell sex at night. “It’s a challenge but it motivates me to
be here every day. We want to make a difference in their lives,” she says. This is one of the
last places anyone would expect would be a paragon of educational excellence.
Yet, Sobral has gone through an extraordinary metamorphosis and is now the best
place in Brazil to get a state education. The city comes top of 5,000
districts in Brazil’s education development index. Fifteen years ago,
it was ranked 1,366th. Since 2015, literacy rates have risen from 52% to 92%,
and the number
of families living in extreme poverty has declined by 89%.
This is a stunning
turnaround in a country beset by income inequality and poor literacy
rates: half
of state-educated students are still illiterate by the third grade. So what has been
Sobral’s secret to success? The mayor, Ivo Gomes, says: “We have reached this
position because this is a 23-year-old project that has surpassed changes in
mayors and secretaries of education. People think it’s magic and it’s not. It
is persistence and a lot of hard work.” In 1997, the movement
to improve education in Sobral began with renovating school buildings and
furnishing them with computers and other resources. Public spending on
education was boosted...read more:
