Most Brazilian children are not literate at the right age

As Covid began to spread throughout Brazil, schools across the country closed their doors. According to an October 2022 OECD study, Brazilian schools were closed for nearly 200 days in 2020 alone — more than any other country that year. 

During the pandemic, only Chile, Latvia, and Poland closed schools longer — but these countries surpass Brazil when we include the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, for which Brazilian data remains incomplete.

Several studies have shown how devastating the pandemic was for Brazilian education, deepening economic and racial disparities among students. Each new study adds to Brazil’s recent educational tragedy; the latest, from the National System for the Evaluation of Basic Education (Saeb), shows how the pandemic was even more punishing for children of literacy age. 

A whopping 56 percent of second-grade elementary school students were illiterate in 2021, according to Saeb. Pre-pandemic, this share was 39.7 percent. Part of the problem is a lack of adequate equipment at home, but even among households that provide students with computers and mobile devices, there are limits to how long young children can focus on educational material on screens.

According to Inep, the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research, there is no general consensus on what level a student should achieve in reading and writing by the end of the second year...