By Barbara Bruns
Educational transformations require long-term commitment, passion, and political and managerial skills. In Brazil, Paulo Renato Souza is an inspiring role model for how education can become a matter of state and how to revolutionize education with powerful leadership and management. In what he called the ‘revolução gerenciada,’ he was able to implement an educational reform and be remembered as someone who left an impact that survived the test of time and the political changes of different parties elected.
When Latin America and the Caribbean need greater commitment towards improving education and 13 years after Paulo Renato’s passing, the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) celebrated the legacy of one of its own. Before returning to Brazil in 1994 to become Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s Minister of Education, Paulo Renato was the IDB’s Operations Vice President, where he also left a profound mark.
The event was the premiere of a wonderful new documentary film that traces Paulo Renato’s life and career, called Paulo Renato Souza: The Legacy to Brazilian Education, and a space to reflect on the challenges that education faces today in Latin America and the Caribbean. The film, co-written and produced by Paulo Renato’s son, Renato, is the work of several years and includes interviews with family members, friends, and people who worked with him, including me.
The IDB celebrated one of its own last week – Paulo Renato Souza, who was the IDB’s Operations Vice President for several years before returning to Brazil in 1994 to become Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s Minister of Education. The event was the premiere of a wonderful new documentary film that traces Paulo Renato’s life and career, called Paulo Renato Souza: The Legacy to Brazilian Education.
The film, co-written and produced by Paulo Renato’s son, Renato, is the work of several years and includes interviews with family members, friends, and people who worked with him, including me. I was happy to be included in the excellent panel the IDB invited to discuss Paulo Renato’s legacy and his lessons on effective educational policymaking, the film, and education in Latin America and the Caribbean more generally, with former Minister Gloria Vidal of Ecuador, former Brazilian Minister Jose Henrique Paim, Ariel Fiszbein of the Inter-American Dialogue, and Mercedes Mateo, the IDB’s Education Division Chief. The panel was moderated by Ferdinando Regalia, the IDB’s Social Sector Manager.
As former Minister of Planning in Brazil, Jose Serra, said in the documentary, the story of Brazilian education has two parts: before Paulo Renato and after Paulo Renato.
Having spent several years working in the Brazil of “before” and then having a ringside view of his eight years as Education Minister, I couldn’t agree more.
Education Minister – 1994-2002
I first met Paulo Renato when he asked to meet the World Bank team that had developed two large education loans to Brazil’s nine northeast states in 1994 and 1995. The years of project preparation had led our teams across many of Northeast Brazil’s rural areas. Let me give you a quick snapshot of what we saw:
- “Schools” were basically one or two-room huts, with no water, electricity, blackboard, or books.
- Teachers were hired by the mayor and changed with a change in administration.
- Eighty percent of teachers had not completed secondary school and 30 percent had not completed eight grades of primary school.
- An impact evaluation designed to measure the impact of textbook provision on schools started with a 600-school sample. Conditions were so precarious that when the team went back for endline data six years later, 200 of the schools had disappeared.
- The primary completion rate for the Northeast was less than 20 percent, and Brazil nationally was less than 40 percent, compared with the 70 percent average for Latin America and the Caribbean.
- Schooling conditions in other parts of Brazil were better, but the Northeast was a big part of the challenge that confronted Paulo Renato as minister.
When we met, Paulo Renato wanted to talk about a very small part of the $900 million Northeast education loans — US $10 million that we had carved out for a “national component.” Paulo Renato told me, “That component was like a gift to me – it gave me the resources to build up the team and systems I needed. There are crucial functions the Ministry of Education needs to play in a decentralized system of 200,000 schools like Brazil’s – and which we had not been playing. Funding is incredibly unequal. In the Northeast states you have seen, municipal schools spend $30/child per year, while Sao Paulo spends $1,000/child. Our overall education data (number of schools, teachers, enrollments, repetition) are very weak. And above all, we have no data on how much students are learning.”
Paulo Renato lost no time in using that $10 million to establish INEP (the National Institute for Education Planning) and staff it with Brazil’s top education experts, such as Maria Helena Castro and Ines Fini, and launching studies and reform proposals. He also told us that he was increasing the Ministry’s communications budget ten-fold.
What followed was the most intense eight-year period of innovation, reform, and education improvement that I have ever seen. I was so staggered by the enormity of the changes that I commissioned a Harvard case study of Paulo Renato’s first three years in office.
The Transformative Impact of FUNDEF
The film does an excellent job of chronicling these years, starting with the radical financing reform that remade the structure of Brazilian education. FUNDEF established a national capitation grant for primary education. Equalizing funding required the federal government to shift funds from richer states to poorer ones. States were then responsible for assuring the redistribution from richer to poorer municipalities in order to achieve the capitation level for all primary education students in their state. In 1998, the year that the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Teacher Appreciation (FUNDEF) became effective, a massive 25% of the entire Brazilian basic education budget was redistributed.
Paulo Renato told me at the time, “I know that people say it is important to have consultations before designing reforms, but I knew that would not work here. So I had to do it as a ‘stealth’ reform — getting it through the legislature before anyone started working out the numbers!”
FUNDEF had rapid transformative impacts in the Northeast. Mayors recognized the capitation incentive to get more children into their schools and started using school buses for the first time to bring children from rural areas into larger centers. The Gomes brothers (mayor Cid Gomes and his brother Ivo, education secretary) in Sobral in Ceara are a good example. From 1997-1999, Sobral’s primary enrollments increased from 9,000 to 17,000. The FUNDEF reform also mandated that 60% of the capitation be used for teacher salaries. Again, Sobral is a good example. All of the existing teachers were fired, and new ones were hired for the first time using objective standards (complete secondary education and an interview). The new funds also permitted the construction of modern school buildings, plus desks, books, and materials.
The incentive effects of FUNDEF went beyond the Northeast. It gave states as well as the federal government strong incentives to improve the quality of enrollment data and to track funding flows. Over this period, INEP became a model for the LAC region for the quality, timeliness, and research utilization of education enrollment and financing data. Capitation financing also created an incentive to reduce Brazil’s extraordinary primary school 40% repetition rate. Fewer repeaters meant space for additional new students.
Assessing: Key for Improving
FUNDEF was transformative. But Paulo Renato was just beginning. Brazil’s first national assessment, SAEB, was launched, testing math and language in a representative sample of schools in grades 5 and 9. SAEB was another example of Paulo Renato the tactician. He told me, “We need to reform the curriculum, but if I try to negotiate that with the teachers’ unions, we will be here for years, discussing every word while other countries move ahead.” His solution? Embed the skills and competencies Brazil needs in the SAEB assessment and states and municipalities will have to align their curricula with these skills to raise test scores.
He also set his sights on joining the first round of the OECD’s new PISA test in 2000. He told me, “If you want to play football, you have to play on the same size field. We need to know how our students compare with the rest of the world.” He told me he took that message to President Cardoso and added: “If we join this, you have to be prepared, Brazil will finish last and it will be a national embarrassment. But that’s what we need to argue for more reforms.” Indeed, Brazil did finish 55th out of 55 countries.
The strategic brilliance and creativity of Paulo Renato’s eight years as minister are hard to overstate – and the film does an excellent job of covering these chapters. The “vestibular” process of accessing higher education by taking separate entrance tests for different universities created an unfair financial burden for low-income students. To improve equity, Paulo Renato devised a high school exit exam (ENEM) that could be used for university entrance and for students entering the labor market.
How do you stimulate higher education reform in a sector that is notoriously difficult to regulate? Paulo Renato instigated anonymous tests for students graduating from different universities by discipline: law, medicine, teacher preparation. The tests had no stakes for the students but provided a clear basis for comparing the quality of different universities’ programs. Nonetheless, the “Provao” provoked reactions on all sides. Paulo Renato told me, “I went on MTV to promote it and it was a cat fight. But a big part of a minister’s job is to go out in public and explain reforms and hear the reactions.”
His Legacy
Seeing this whole transformative agenda presented in the film, it hit me that all of these reforms are part of Brazilian education today. In several cases, they have been extended and deepened. Everyone who works in development knows how often reforms introduced by one administration are reversed by the following one.
President Cardoso was followed by Lula, a politician from the opposition party and a very different point on the political spectrum. It is to Lula’s credit that he also prioritized education and maintained the same direction of reform, and appointed a talented, technocratic minister (Fernando Haddad). But it also reflects the quality and relevance of the reforms Paulo Renato launched and the fact that their positive impacts after 4-5 years were already evident. Lula extended the FUNDEF to cover secondary education enrollments and financing (FUNDEB), and made the SAEB assessment universal, so that every school, municipality, and state in Brazil could track their learning progress.
His Role as Sao Paulo’s State Secretary of Education
My next chance to work with Paulo Renato was when he was named Education Secretary of the State of Sao Paulo in 2008. Since teacher hiring is at the state and municipal levels in Brazil, this was his first chance to attack the issue of teacher quality directly. He started with a reform to make promotions meritocratic rather than automatic with years of service — the Prova de Promoção. He also launched an innovative voucher program to let families buy language services from the many private language schools in Sao Paulo, rather than try to build up second-class language programs in the public secondary schools.
He brought his full energy and technical expertise to the job. He would whip out his laptop every time I visited in order to share the latest data. After Claudio Ferraz and I met with him to discuss an impact evaluation of the Prova de Promoção, Claudio said admiringly, “How often do you get to talk regressions with an education secretary?”
The Politician
Once again, Paulo Renato packed a lot of innovation and progress into his time in office. This time, the tenure was very short. After the 2010 election, he was not asked to stay on as Minister.
When I saw him after that and heard that the language vouchers and Prova de Promoção were already being rolled back, I said, “I am so depressed.” He replied, “You’re depressed. How do you think I feel?” But then came his wide smile as he spread his hands. “But that’s politics.”
The Father of Brazilian Education
The last time I saw him was the following weekend when I was having lunch with friends at a Sao Paulo restaurant. He was at a table across the room with his son Renato and his grandchildren. He beckoned me to come over and the children bubbled with excitement, practicing English with me and showing me their drawings. I went back to my table and will never forget the image of one of the children jumping into his lap. How fitting that my last memory of the man who did so much to improve education for Brazil’s children should be encircled by them.