Lack of education is one of Latin America's great blights, but, despite that, pockets of excellence exist that can serve as models for the future

By TIM PADGETT

y most accounts, Chileans ought to feel as smug about their schools as they do about their economy. Chile, after all, gets a larger proportion of its children through primary school (95%) and spends a greater share of its gross domestic product on education (7%) than any other country in Latin America.

So why isn't anyone raising a glass of Concha y Toro in celebration? "Chile may be a center of educational excellence in Latin America, but that isn't saying much," notes Gabriel Aranguiz, an education-reform coordinator with the government of President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Latin American children average little more than five years of schooling--and they are in the fastest-growing sector of the population. Countries like Argentina that once prided themselves on near universal literacy now face dropout rates of 14%. Brazil spends a mere 1% of GDP on education, a quarter of what the United Nations recommends. Result: an official illiteracy rate of nearly 20%, one of the world's highest. And even when money is spent, much of it seems to be wasted. Despite education-spending increases that averaged 25% during the 1990s, the proportion of Latin American primary school students repeating grades has risen to almost 15%--higher than in Africa.

Slowly and painfully, Latin America is learning that quality, not just quantity, matters--and in Chile and elsewhere, there are pockets of innovation and excellence that may serve as models for the future. As the heads of state at this week's hemispheric summit take educational improvement as one of their themes, they would do well to look at some of the heartening examples in their host country and elsewhere.

One beneficiary of these experiments is Gloria Estrada, 13, an eighth-grade student at Pablo Neruda Public School, in Santiago's southside working-class barrio of San Miguel. Since 1996, Estrada's school has been using equipment purchased with a $5,000 government grant for a student-run radio station called the Voice of Youth. It is part of an innovative teaching idea intended to spark interest in subjects ranging from math to civics. Estrada is a practicing radio reporter, and she broadcast an interview with the local mayor, pressing him on why there are no speed bumps on streets near the school. Her teachers say the assignments have raised Estrada's communications and civics skills. She agrees: "I've become more daring, more confident."

Daring is what schools like Neruda have needed for decades. A study by Chile's independent Center for Public Studies lambastes the nation's archaic Spanish and math textbooks, which still rely on tedious grammar and algebra drills, for blunting proficiency in language usage, reading and reasoning. Now, for a modest investment, Neruda's teachers have a practical laboratory where they can seed the new methods they're acquiring, such as inventive group problem-solving and creative self-expression exercises. Each day at the radio station, teacher-supervised student groups plan 15-minute programming slots that engage their math and language talents--and galvanize their desire to learn.

"I pay more attention to the news now," says Claudio Escobar, 14, as he and his cluster plot portions of the station's cultural hour. Today they are presenting Polynesian melodies from Chile's Easter Island, while five-year-olds in a nearby kindergarten class draw and discuss pictures inspired by the music coming over the loudspeakers.

Neither the school nor the government has scientifically tested the degree of improvement wrought by the station. But Neruda's teachers say grades are definitely up, and a major reason is that students whose averages slip too low can't participate in the station's programming.

Investments like the Voice of Youth seem like a drop in the bucket compared with the government's aim to spend $1.5 billion on a school-overhaul package that includes improved teacher training and salaries and longer schooldays. But more than $2.5 million spent on seed money for innovative programs may bear the most interesting fruit. In heavily indigenous southern Chile, for example, the Coihueco Rural School claims to have remotivated Mapuche Indian students with a grant to blend tribal weaving and music classes into its curriculum. The secret, says teacher Juana Hueitra Alcapan, herself a Mapuche, is ethnic self-esteem. She has seen grades shoot up in Coihueco's history classes, sparked largely by the renewed interest in Mapuche culture. That revival has also led to greater support from parents, who as children were encouraged to keep silent about their native roots.

Colombia suffers from growing guerrilla warfare, the anarchy of the drug trade, and endemic poverty, yet there is something for youngsters to smile at thanks to a resourceful educational movement known as Escuelas Nuevas, or New Schools. At the Poveda 2 New School in the farming town of Tenjo, an hour outside Bogota, teacher Andrea Otero has three grade levels to contend with, but Hernan Silva, 9, works studiously under the tough oversight of Julie Carolina Hoyos, a 10-year-old fourth-grader who is seeing him through a rough patch of third-grade math.

Poveda 2 is part of a trend that started more than a decade ago to ease the perennial shortage of rural teachers and keep neglected rural kids in school. The teachers, with the blessing of the Education Ministry, began arranging for older students to tutor younger ones using special guidebooks designed by the instructors and now published by the ministry. Today there are 17,000 New Schools, about one-third of Colombia's entire public primary inventory. Along with peer-group assistants, student "administrations" also help with the day-to-day running of the schools and create independent study groups on soil erosion and other topics that are relevant to their lives. Says Patrick McEwan, an education researcher at Stanford University who conducted a study of the movement: "At a New School, you get a palpable sense that there's learning going on."

Some critics of the movement are worried that improvisational learning will leave holes in Silva's education. The Stanford findings suggest that the method is filling gaps instead. New School students outscore Colombia's traditional-school pupils in Spanish and math by more than 5 percentage points in some grades.

The New Schools win special praise for bypassing dysfunctional central administrations and teachers' unions, which are notorious for shutting out parents and communities in Latin America. As a result of increased parental and municipal involvement, including business backing, 67% of New Schools have libraries while 67% of Colombia's traditional public primary schools do not. Says Vicky Colbert, head of a Bogota civic group that supports the New Schools: "The grass-roots motivation is the most important factor."

It's also why New School teachers get better training as well as higher pay and unusual benefits like housing. "I would never return to traditional methods," says Bertha Triana, who was a regular teacher seven years ago before coming to Poveda 2. "The results here encourage us to go on." Poveda estimates that more than 70% of its students stay in school beyond the fifth grade. That's well above the average in Colombia and in all of Latin America--where, the Interamerican Development Bank estimates, each additional year of average schooling will add a full percentage point to average economic growth. The New Schools concept has been exported to Guatemala and El Salvador as well as India and Bangladesh.

For a small, middle-class country like Costa Rica, the problem has never been getting children through primary school grades. Nearly 100% of Costa Rican school children finish Grade 6. Costa Rica is working to make high school graduation just as routine. This year the government of outgoing President Jose Maria Figueres has set aside 6% of its $9 billion GDP for education, and hopes to increase the country's stock of 300 high schools by 15%. The government has recognized that bricks and mortar do not a good school make. By next year, it is expected, every public high school will have a computer lab and each student will be assigned an E-mail address on the Internet; English classes will be mandatory. State-run technical high schools are modernizing their curriculums to include state-of-the-art electronics and production techniques. The reason is simple, says Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Sibaja. "We don't want to compete for high tech's lowest salaries," he explains. "Our people will be highly trained and well prepared."

Costa Rica is taking that ambitious goal to the poorest and most remote corners of the country, which is possible in large part because only 1.6% of Costa Rica's education budget supports a bureaucracy. (In Venezuela, by contrast, the figure is 30%.) A year ago, the nearest high school for Costa Rican teen-agers like Harold Cruz, 18, who lives on the poor Pacific fishing island of Chira, was an hour's journey by bus and motorized canoe. When a boat carrying Cruz and other students capsized in rough waters, the government responded by building a high school on the island for just 100 students--and has budgeted for a computer lab, despite the daunting problems of getting equipment there and maintaining it. Cruz is the school's best student; he now hopes to attend university, an aspiration that was previously unheard of on Chira. "My dream," Cruz says, "is to give something back to the island."

Costa Rica as a whole is already getting something back. Next year U.S. computer titan Intel will start up a $200 million complex of four new testing and packaging plants near San Jose. That will mean jobs for 3,500 people at above-average salaries by 2002. The company has made it clear that Costa Rica's well- educated labor force was "essential" to the decision to set up shop.

Compared with Costa Rica, Brazil's educational needs are desperate, and the drag they impose on Latin America's attainment is heavy. The average length of schooling for Brazilians is four years. Their teachers attend school for only 11 years on average. In some states they are paid as little as $20 a month, and they can go an entire school year without seeing a paycheck. As a result, the country has a primary school grade-repetition rate of 17%--Latin America's highest--and it takes a student, on average, 11 years to complete eight years of school. Teaching is so bad in Brazil that one of the fastest-growing professions in slums is that of explicadora, an unlicensed tutor who gives private lessons for a monthly fee of $15 a student. It's much cheaper than a private school--and three times as much as the average per capita federal spending on education.

The government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso is the first in decades to tackle education reform, especially from a pragmatic angle. Certainly Brazil has to earmark more funds for schools, says Education Minister Paulo Renato de Souza, but first "we have to reshuffle the money." Souza is diverting almost $3 billion in federal education funds directly to local school districts in exchange for vastly improved accountability. "At least I know local school districts won't turn around and spend it on patronage projects like roads and bridges," he told TIME.

Souza has started a dynamic push to forge school-business partnerships that could be an inspiration for the entire region. Corporate sponsorship of schools is a growing theme throughout Latin America. In just a few years, more than 50 corporation-funded foundations have sprung up in Brazil, with endowments worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In a country where workers have an average of less than five years of schooling, it's understandable that companies have come onboard. Sao Paulo cosmetics giant Natura, for example, donated more than $3 million in training funds last year to public schools, including the Escola Matilde Maria Cremm, which is next door to Natura's suburban factory.

Cremm and its 1,100 students have been transformed since the Natura partnership got under way four years ago. As a result of new faculty training and evaluation, 38 of Cremm's 54 teachers are board-certified in their subjects, an 80% leap. "Our teachers work harder than ever before," says assistant school director Maria Cristina Walter. But they stay on, says newly certified teacher Irineu Oliveira, "because this program actually works."

Cremm certainly isn't Eton. But the little victories keep adding up. Innovative texts and curriculums have helped cut the student dropout rate more than half, to 8%. Failure rates have slumped dramatically. School walls are being decorated this month by students participating in a Natura-sponsored art contest, and pupil platoons police the grounds to guard against littering and vandalism.

The arrangement is helping Natura develop not only better future workers but also better current ones: 60 of its under-educated factory hands are taking classes at Cremm as part of a new company policy to promote and hire primary school graduates. Natura executives promise that the program will expand. "I don't know if education will solve all our problems," says Natura vice president Guilherme Peirao Leal. "But without it, we'll solve none of them."

There is more--much more--to do. But perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the small but hardy success stories across Latin America is the fact that they even exist. Politicians, after all, are not much different from children: they probably learn best by example.

--With Reporting by Sol Biderman /Sao Paulo, Jack Epstein /Rio De Janeiro, Cathleen Farrell / Tenjo, Elizabeth Love /Santiago and Christine Pratt /Chira Island