# **5. Policy Recommendations on How to Improve Education in Paraíba**

Widespread poverty affects both students’ performance and their availability to attend school as their parents compare the cost and benefits of an additional income earner and household support against future gains from additional schooling. These factors demonstrate the effect of a perceived lack of benefit from an education system that is marked by high repetition, high dropout, and low achievement rates. Low levels of education leads to low income, which in turn perpetuates poverty. Policies to improve the quality of education should be the core of the government’s poverty reduction strategy. The fact that the poorest 30 percent of Brazilian students have only a 15 percent chance of completing grade four reveals that literacy, achievement, and poverty are highly correlated. Furthermore, low levels of education also affect economic growth through low labor productivity. Hence, education is a key to economic growth and poverty reduction.

Paraíba has made much progress in improving school buildings and equipment and getting the majority of children aged 7-14 in school. The next steps for the government in Paraíba are to increase the education-attainment of the poor; improve the quality of supplied education, including reduction of repetition and school desertion rates; and increase school access for students in rural areas that finish 4<sup>th</sup> grade.

It is clear that the high illiteracy rates and weak schooling system are problems in Paraíba. Better education will help increase incomes, but it cannot bring an instant reduction in poverty. There has been a rapid expansion of education, but it will take time for the average years of schooling of the workforce to increase. Breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty requires far-reaching actions in the education sector. Based on the above analysis of the state of education, the following suggestions would help to improve education achievements.

Poor classroom practices are at the core of low educational outcomes. Addressing these requires better teachers and school management. Low content knowledge and poor teaching skills are common among teachers and contribute to low student achievement and high repetition and dropout rates. The management of schools also needs improvement. Paraíba has full-time principals in most schools and some form of incentives may be needed to improve their management of schools. Supply-side policies could channel resources to under-performing schools based on SAEB results.

Students living in rural areas have less access to schools above 4<sup>th</sup> grade than urban students. Furthermore, they repeat more and drop out earlier than their urban peers. Hence, increased rural focus to close the negative gap between the urban and rural learning and education attainment in Paraíba is needed.

Children from poor households have lower enrollment rates, higher repetition rates, and higher dropout rates than children from nonpoor households. Hence, more assistance to the poor students, such as tutoring, is needed to ensure that they advance as rapidly as the rich students and reach the same level. As girls are now doing better than boys in school, care is needed that boys do not fall behind in Paraíba.

36