Six Latin American Countries' Test Scores Near Bottom—Again

Originally published in Jeffrey Puryear’s monthly “Human Capital” column for the Dialogue's daily Latin America Advisor on December 17, 2007.

WASHINGTON, DC—Once again Latin America has scored near the bottom in a major international test of student achievement. How should we interpret its poor showing?

The test—the Program in International Student Achievement (PISA)—is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and compares the reading, mathematics, and scientific skills of 400,000 15-year-olds in 57 countries making up nearly 90 percent of the world economy. Finland and South Korea generally scored at the top, followed closely by Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, and New Zealand. The six Latin American countries that participated (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay) all had relatively low scores, ranking firmly in the bottom third.

Chile topped its neighbors in science and reading, and was second-highest in the region (behind Uruguay) in mathematics. Several of the Latin American countries showed progress compared to previous years (Chile in reading; Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay in math). Argentina, on the other hand, scored lower than it had in earlier tests.

But the real story is Latin America's uniformly poor performance compared to the rest of the world. In science, only Chile and Uruguay had any students at all who reached the highest level (0.1 percent), compared with the OECD average of 1.3 percent. By contrast, well over a quarter of students from Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, and nearly 20 percent from Mexico, scored at the lowest level in science (which the OECD characterizes as "not able to participate actively in life situations related to science and technology"). Scores in reading and math showed similarly disturbing results.

Most worrisome is that other countries at similar income levels are doing better than the best performers in Latin America. Poland and Estonia, which have per capita incomes comparable to the Latin American participants, scored at or above the OECD mean in all three subjects, whereas Latin America consistently scored well below the OECD mean. Poland, in fact, not only scored well, but improved more overall than any other participating country since the PISA exam of 2000.

Why doesn't Latin America do better? There is no single answer, and most Latin American countries clearly can't expect to do as well as wealthy countries such as Finland any time soon. Still, it is telling that Latin America has failed to put into place a number of components that are common in the world's high-performing school systems. These include: world-class standards (especially in reading and math); incentives to get and keep first-rate teachers; mechanisms to make teachers effective instructors; special attention to students who fall behind; and universal pre-school.

Latin America's poor performance in the PISA exam signals clearly that its schools are not providing children with an internationally competitive education, and are unlikely to contribute much to reducing poverty or inequality. Until leaders decide to invest the political and financial resources necessary to adopt and implement policies that have shown success elsewhere, the region's performance in international student achievement tests like PISA is unlikely to improve.

Jeffrey Puryear is Vice President for Social Policy at the Inter-American Dialogue.