O programa “No Child Left Behind”, do governo americano, tem o ambicioso objetivo de acabar com as diferenças de desempenho escolar entre crianças e pobres e ricas e negros e brancos, problema que parece insolúvel, e que é mais grave ainda no Brasil. Este programa foi analizado recentemente em excelente artigo no New York Times Magazine, que resume a literatura sobre os deficits cognitivos das crianças que se desenvolvem em ambientes sociais menos favorecidos. Ele mostra, primeiro, que o “No Child Left Behind” não está conseguindo atingir seus objetivos; mas que, segundo, existem experimentos importantes, ainda que em pequena escala, que dão bons resultados, e que sinalizam o que é necessário fazer.
Miiriam escreve que o link para o artigo do New York Times Maganize não estava funcionando. Agora está.
Recent field research in 96 public primary Latin American schools (Laura Randall, ed., Factors Affecting Learning and Cost Effective Schooling in Latin America,Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, Mellen, 2005) supports many of the points made in Paul Tough’s article “What It Takes to Make a Student” (New York Times Magazine,November 26, 2006).
This field research indicates that training teachers to use constructivist techniques, heterogeneous socioeconomic conditions of families whose children are in a classroom, and continuity of educational techniques used and educational programs implemented for several years are essential for good educational outcomes.
These factors are more important than individual characteristics of students such as race, gender, or socioeconomic conditions.
The best action for government to take to improve education is to integrate housing along socioeconomic (class) lines. An alternate way of viewing this is that creating and implementing policies that increase poor families’ income and employment would allow them to obtain the adequate housing conditions needed for high educational achievement.
Giving higher pay to teachers for excellence, rather than requiring them to become administrators to earn more, teaching parents to talk to their children at an early age, emphasizing homework and training parents to encourage completing homework, and to provide positive expectations for the benefits of their child’s schooling are areas in which educational programs can play a positive role.
Because school attendance improves with student health, it is likely that preventive public health programs would also (implicitly) increase student achievement.
An additional point is that educational programs affect learning language and learning mathematics in different ways. The preschool and continuing language gap between children from higher and from lower socioeconomic groups is difficult to diminish because language is primarily learned at home; this is less true of mathematics, where the gap between rich and poor children can be reduced as a result of schooling.
This suggests that emphasizing mathematics programs for students with whose families have low income would have the greatest impact on their educational outcomes, and enable the students to obtain the jobs requiring mathematics skills that are well paid in economies where job creation is in high technology industries.