Brazil’s technical schools a silver lining in struggling education system

At first glance, the quality of Brazil’s educational system may seem abysmal. The latest edition of the Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa) by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) places Brazil in the bottom ten of its ranking of 70 countries in science, math, and reading.

Moreover, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) reports that over half of Brazilian citizens over 25 years old do not have high school diplomas—among which 33 percent haven’t even finished elementary school.

While the overall performance is very poor, there is a silver lining to prove that Brazil is capable of producing high-quality schools. Another assessment test performed by the OECD, called Pisa-for-Schools, evaluates 15-year-old students from 70 countries. In Brazil, 46 schools were selected to participate, of which 33 were public facilities.

To the surprise of many, one group of students performed better than many of their counterparts from developed countries. The students in question came from state technical schools (ETECs) in São Paulo. In three schools located in the state capital (one of which is in Jardim Ângela—a neighborhood with the fourth-lowest Human Development Index of São Paulo), the overall performance was better than average scores in Canada, Finland, Japan, Poland, Portugal, France, the...