The quality of public education is endangering the country’s future

This educational researcher reflects on the limitations of Nicaragua’s educational system and describes what quality education would be like.

Vanessa Castro

I want to reflect on the public education the State is offering the majority of the population, financed with the public money contributed by Nicaraguan citizens through our taxes and citizens of other countries through their government’s bilateral donations. What should concern us most as aware citizens who want to help make Nicaragua better and who see education as a way to achieve this over the long haul is the education received by children who live at a serious disadvantage. For that reason, I want to analyze the quality of the education provided in public schools, since the private ones have enough material resources and can pay for better human resources to guarantee a better education.

The Matthew effect

The first thing I want to say about the quality of public education in Nicaragua is that there’s a serious inequality between what students receive in the rural areas and the Caribbean Coast and what they receive in less poor urban areas. In the Caribbean—one of Nicaragua’s least populated areas but whose inhabitants are no less important—and the remote rural areas in the departments of Río San Juan, Jinotega and Matagalpa we find schools with poor infrastructure and the greatest concentration of teachers who were never able to receive adequate training. The low quality of this educational supply affects the poor most, generating what’s known in education as the “Matthew effect,” after the statement the Gospel of Matthew attributes to Jesus: “To everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”

According to 2008 data, 27.3% of primary school teachers are what are known as “empirical.” They are teaching without a credential and lack specialized training because they neither studied in a teaching school nor obtained a degree in education. That same year empiricism was 42.7% in the multi-grade schools that predominate in rural areas, 58% in Jinotega and as high as 68% in the Northern Caribbean.

We are confronted with a vicious circle that generates more inequality, since those born most disfavored receive less—a lower-quality education—whereas the system ought to be organized to provide more to them, offering them a way out of their poverty. What we see, in short, is that poverty is the number one enemy of quality education.

We need a policy of State, not of governments

We also need to understand that education is a public service provided by the State and must be administered as one. A country’s institutionality provides a framework for the policies in the different areas of government. Countries that have made more progress in their educational systems and the quality of their supply have turned their educational policies into state policies, untouched by the coming and going of parties or by their passing interests. The kind of institutionality needed to ensure quality involves an educational plan agreed to by all those interested in improving the service: aware citizens, teachers, students, unions, parents, politicians… It also involves a policy to professionalize teachers and education officials that includes selection requisites, certifications for working in the different posts, etc.

In countries with greater educational quality and coverage, education doesn’t belong to the governing party. Unfortunately, not only is education in Nicaragua decided by the governing party, but each minister has the power to set priorities. Since education isn’t a state policy, that public service is easily tampered with and the decisions of a given administration—at times even those of a single minster—are changed with little evaluation and without weaving in the lessons learned. The stability of educational policies is very important to reaping long-term fruits.

The lack of continuity in policies has an ongoing effect on the educational service. The more a country accumulates reforms in its education system, the greater the risk that students won’t learn, because teachers don’t adapt all that easily to the seesawing of educational policy designs issued from desks far from the classroom—however well-intentioned they often are.

Education budget

In part because of this short-sighted vision of educational work and in part because Nicaragua is governed with a limited budget, investing in education isn’t a priority and educational spending is insufficient. The budget for basic education represented only 3.8% of the gross domestic product in 2008 and hasn’t grown much since then. Such a low budget means such low salaries for teachers that most of them make less than domestic workers, as well as a lack of resources to invest in infrastructure and limitations on providing adequate accompaniment to the schools. Although these issues have received a lot of public attention, it hasn’t brought about any change in the situation in recent years.

To say that education is free in Nicaragua isn’t true. All Nicaraguans who pay taxes help meet the cost of public education. Its cost is even greater for families who send their children to public schools, because in addition to paying taxes, they have to pay for their kids’ school supplies, clothes and shoes.

Through our taxes, Nicaraguans contribute the equivalent of $40.15 each year per preschool student, $195.54 per primary student, $118.60 per secondary student, $154.35 per trained teacher and $1,154 per university student. But since it’s an invisible payment, those who pay for this service and those who receive it forget we have a right to demand better quality.

Free education is a right established in our Constitution, but each Nicaraguan should be duly informed that even though there’s no enrollment cost or monthly fee, that service is very expensive. Armed with that information and with conviction, parents, students and citizens should pledge to work hard to see that our money translates into a better service. As long as we’re stuck with the culture that we “shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” families in many areas of the country will feel satisfied with their children sometimes receiving classes only three days a week, even though they learn very little of what only school can teach them: to read and write and to develop analytical and logical thought.

Quality teachers are crucial
to quality education

What are the requisites that help ensure educational quality? For one, it’s essential for the educational system to have quality teachers (with vocation and motivation, trained for their work and satisfied with their remuneration). In addition to knowing the materials they teach and how to teach them, it’s fundamental that they show up every day to give their class and make use of every hour of that class time to foster quality learning in at least the crucial subjects—reading, writing, math and science—to provide continuity in the students’ cognitive development.

Regarding teachers’ dominion over the vital aspects to ensure learning, the results of national tests as well as those such as EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment—a kind of barometer to evaluate children’s dominion over reading skills in the first four primary grades) show deficiencies in reading ability in Nicaragua, particularly in reading comprehension, which is a critical faculty for continued learning. Given that finding, the question has to be asked: how many teachers have mastered reading comprehension strategies?

In my experience giving classes to educators and facilitating the campaign “Let’s all read,” I’ve noticed that even many motivated, disciplined teachers who are interested in seeing their students learn have no idea of how vital reading comprehension is to those students’ ability to keep learning and be able to fully and actively participate in society. This lack of awareness, which is not the result of a lack of will, means that they tend to teach reading mechanically, by memory. Memory of course plays an important role in learning, but it’s just an instrument, never an end in itself.

The same is true for math evaluations, which indicate that we also have deficiencies in that field. This leads me to wonder if we shouldn’t be prioritizing teacher training in the management, command and pedagogy of these courses.

I think that if we keep training teachers for free in the teaching schools, including room and board, we’ll foster the idea that going to teaching school is a cheap way to get an education and many will use it as a trampoline to then go work in other things. It’s good to provide scholarships, but selection mechanisms are needed to guarantee that the teaching schools are for those with real motivation and vocation. Teaching is a public service and teachers are public servants, but unfortunately there’s no public service culture in our country. Not only do a large number of our teachers not feel like public servants; the governments don’t treat them as if they were either. I think that in such sensitive professions as teaching, applicants ought to first pass tests on their emotional intelligence and capacity for human relations. Working with small, fragile children in a period when their brain is extremely susceptible to both good and bad influences requires highly prepared professionals. Quality education requires efficient selection, preparation and certification mechanisms to ensure that the teachers have the capacity to produce the best possible work.

There have been no studies about teacher attendance in class, or about what they really do with their students during class time. Such analysis would be interesting to document problems and find solutions to them. It’s “vox populi” that many teachers in the rural and Caribbean areas don’t show up at school until Tuesday and take off again on Thursday. I know from parents and students that others chat on their cell phones while teaching first grade children.

These problems have to do with an educational system design that doesn’t give accountability the necessary importance. There should be mechanisms to sanction undisciplined educators and above all to stimulate them to do their job despite distances, rain and other limitations. Unfortunately, a teacher’s non-attendance has a major effect on the students; they can’t learn by osmosis, much less find the motivation to attend school if after a long walk they don’t find their teacher waiting for them in the classroom. It’s a discouragement even for those most interested in learning, especially in environments that don’t favor learning.

Caring teaching is also
crucial to quality education

Teaching with affection is also a central component of quality education. A caring teacher can awaken the potential in any child, even one from a broken home or a marginalized community. Since 2007 I’ve participated in various research studies on learning reading and math to determine what factors related to the classroom and the teacher have a positive effect on learning. We discovered that the affection teachers give the students and the motivation with which they stimulate them has a very positive impact on their learning. I’m not talking about giving little gifts or constant hugs or kisses. It’s enough, according to these studies, for the teacher to say “You did that really well!” or write “Congratulations!” after marking a homework assignment. These studies—one done in Honduras and the others either in Nicaragua or based on Nicaraguan national test data—statistically verified that such small details are extremely important to a first, second or third grader.

I’m a firm believer in affective pedagogy. There’s mistreatment in many schools. And I’m not only talking about bullying among the children themselves; there’s also teacher abuse of students and even vice versa, sometimes for political reasons. Nicaraguan society is has lived through a lot of violence, and given that school always reflects the larger society, it can’t be an island of peace and harmony if there’s violence in the homes and the streets.

Quality education must be fun

Quality education also has to take into account how important fun is to learning. The more fun children have learning, the more they learn. We now know that among the substances that connect our neurons, serotonin and dopamine provide pleasure and exercise a fixing effect on everything we learn. Learning will be less effective if we don’t create classroom environments that help produce these substances, because they are the “cement” of the learning process. Yet, classes are boring in most Nicaraguan schools, both public and private, with the teacher lecturing and the students writing it down or repeating it from memory.

We also now know that 10% of what we learn comes from what we read and 90% from what we do and say and thus internalize. Two weeks after having read something or listened to a conference, we remember 10% of what we read and 20% of what we heard. So what are we to think of teachers who do nothing in the classroom except lecture, using only the auditory learning channel and not giving enough importance to students putting into practice one way or another each thing they’re being taught?

Quality education doesn’t discriminate
against disadvantaged children

My graduation thesis looked at why children fail first grade and what influence the teachers’ beliefs about those children and about education have on that failure. I discovered that many of the educators I worked with discriminated against the least advantaged students, and not surprisingly they were the ones who had to repeat the grade. The majority of the teachers interviewed believed that repeating the course was important because if the child hadn’t learned the first time around he or she would the second… or third time. But in education that’s a false notion. In rural areas, a child who has to repeat a class three times is taken out of school by his dad for being a “brute,” or dunce. Why continue wasting time and sacrificing the help that child could provide with the father’s work?

The real problem was more likely that there was nothing appealing about school or the teacher discriminated against the child for having attention deficit or being ugly or rebellious. In several of the schools I researched, the teachers had already determined which children were going to repeat the class five or six months before the school year ended. They were the most rowdy ones, the ones who came without having bathed, were from broken homes, or, as more than one teacher told me, were children of “mothers who lead a bad life.” Again the Matthew effect was at play here; the vicious circle of inequality was being set in motion all over again.

Quality education requires
materials and infrastructure

Another important requisite for a quality educational service is that the children’s schools have books, writing desks, chalk boards, didactic materials and basic infrastructure, particularly water and latrines. According to data of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), only 48.5% of Nicaraguan’s educational centers have drinkable water and 52.6% of the classrooms (14,637) need repair, rehabilitation or remodeling, with many schools lacking writing desks and even paper. In many rural schools, the children arrive at class having walked for miles carrying their own water to drink because the school doesn’t have any.

So little was invested in books in the 2001-2008 period that, according to the Education Ministry, only 48.9% of primary students had math texts and only 46% had Spanish language texts in 2007. We can see the Matthew effect yet again in a study on reading in the North and South Caribbean Coast conducted by the Center for Social Educational Research and Action (CIASES). In the sample of represen¬tative schools, 90% of the children in inter-cultural bilingual schools had no Spanish or math textbooks. And according to FUNIDES data, there have been no textbooks for over two decades in the secondary schools in those regions. This pathetic reality has been improving since 2010 with funds from World Bank loans and donations, but these deficiencies have already affected the future and had an impact on the learning of the poorest students.

What is school really for?

Quality has to do with what happens in the classroom, the school. What is school all about? It’s supposed to be about learning, particularly learning what can’t be taught at home. But in Nicaragua, as in most other countries—as someone from Fe y Alegría put it—schools are “distracted” from their essential functions, which are to teach children to read, write, and engage in mathematical logic and scientific thinking. Why does this happen? Because the human brain is designed so we start to learn to talk between nine months and two years old. We learn to speak automatically and don’t need anyone to teach us; all we need is to be immersed in a speaking environment. But our brain isn’t designed to learn to read all by itself or to learn mathematical logic if no one teaches us. Only 10,000 years have passed since the creation of the alphabet and our exposure to the written language. Moreover, we have to remember that reading and writing was a privilege of the elites for millennia.

The basic function of schools should be seen as providing students with the competencies they need to go on learning for the rest of their life. School can’t be distracted from these functions, but it is, because no one measures whether or not it’s doing them. It isn’t accountable for this either to the families that pay to send their children to school or to those of us who pay taxes to fund public education.

We need to be able to measure quality

Classrooms in Nicaragua, and in most countries, tend to be a “black box” as it’s very difficult for a director or adviser to be on top of each of the educators who are giving classes. Does the Ministry of Education have the capacity to supervise and, above all, to accompany and support a motivated but inexpert teacher? No, it doesn’t. That task must be done in association with the beneficiaries of education: parents, students and taxpayers. But for that accompaniment to be efficient, the education system has to have a plan with measurable indicators and their corresponding mechanisms to measure the quality of the service. That plan has to really define what is meant by quality. And its indicators have to be clear, to focus on the priorities of what the school is supposed to teach and to be concrete and contextual at each level of the system: the school, the municipality, the department… The measurement systems must serve to prevent learning problems and never be used as punishment mechanisms for either students or teachers, and they must also include mechanisms for feeding the information back to both the students and the teachers.

In the public health system there are clear and precise indicators to measure the quality of the service and assessment tools to make the human appraisals objective. And when there’s non-compliance or neglect, it translates into illnesses or deaths, which can even be subject to lawsuits. We can sue the doctor or the hospital for malpractice; there are sanctions. But a teacher who ends up with half the students dropping out or who doesn’t bother to come to class isn’t accountable to us. The thousands of children who drop out are authentic civil deaths, because no one gave them the opportunity to learn to read and write at the very moment in which their brains had the greatest plasticity to do so. I consider this an authentic social crime, a civic murder. And in many of our schools no one is denouncing such civic murders.

This happens because the institutional circuit, which should have an educational management system for planning, measurements, evaluations, accountability, etc. isn’t sufficiently organized. Even in many places where that circuit has been put into operation, not enough attention is paid to the context of the educational act: who the boys and girls to be taught are, where they are from, what motivation they have to learn…

The role of a concrete evaluation is also underestimated. We currently have measurement mechanisms in reading and writing and in math. Admittedly, they aren’t optimal because anything standardized always has limitations: they don’t cover processes, just specific moments of learning, nor do they provide in-depth knowledge about specifically why a child has difficulties. But even so, standardized tests are an important aid. The EGRA instrument has been available in Spanish since 2007 and is also adjusted to our context. It measures various important reading abilities: how many words the child can read and his or her comprehension level, because understanding what we read is fundamental to learning. The process of reading comprehensively activates various areas of the brain.

We need to stay on top of research advances

It’s often argued that 12 years of schooling allow one to climb out of poverty. While that’s technically true, multiple studies show that the issue isn’t how many years one spends in school, but rather what one learns in those years. Given the evidence, I find myself wondering if Nicaragua gives enough importance to reading, the first step to any learning.

Another major problem of our educational system—which we also see in other countries—is that educational planning and teaching aren’t systematically fed with the discoveries of educational research, above all the findings of neuroscience in the past 15 years. Our teachers know nothing about this information coming out in important studies around the world. The libraries in Nicaragua’s teaching schools and universities are behind the times, a problem added to seemingly little interest in acquiring scientific knowledge. That tendency could be related to the high price of books or to their limited availability, but it’s also a problem of many communities lacking cultural capital.

Improving educational quality involves frequently informing teachers, directors and Education Ministry officials and disseminating the best practices. These practices don’t need to be from outside our country; many successful schools in Nicaragua give disadvantaged children quality attention, but we know little about those cases. Our culture tends to stress the negative aspects and underestimate our capacities as a people to do positive things.

Quality education requires family participation

Parents’ participation in their children’s schooling is fundamental to quality education. What has happened with that? There’s a legal framework that guarantees it, but it’s not being duly promoted or guided.

Not all kinds of family participation in a school influence the quality of its service. The participation that really has an impact goes beyond painting the school or repairing writing desks, tasks that are important but not so fundamental. The kind of participation that has a positive impact is associated with quality controls, with supporting the school by substituting teachers if they fail to give classes, with creating story reading networks to foster reading habits in first and second grade children... It should also be separated from parties and politicking.

We have to improve the system’s efficiency

The reason we’re always struggling against illiteracy in Nicaragua is that we have such a high dropout rate in the first four primary grades. Children who drop out very quickly become functional illiterates: they may know how to sign their name or read a sign with big letters, but reading a newspaper to find out what’s happening in the country is impossible for them.

The educational system’s efficiency has definitely improved in recent years, as we’ve increased coverage rates and reduced repeated classes and dropouts, but we have to get even better results. Lack of efficiency is related to multiple factors, many of them non-academic. Among the most important academic ones are the failure of teachers to show up for class; the presence of insufficiently prepared directors because Nicaragua doesn’t have the professional and institutional mechanisms to select people to occupy key positions in the education system; parents’ limited involvement in improving the service; and scant accountability to families and society, which are paying for that public service.

Above all, we need to attract and stimulate the best people to be teachers, showcase the work of the best directors, provide priority attention to the first grades of primary school and extend preschool coverage. It’s not right to concentrate the teachers with less training in first grade. According to a study by José Ramón Laguna, 25.5% of Nicaragua’s first grade teachers are empirical, a percentage that drops to 16% by fourth grade. In the fourth grade these better-prepared teachers are working with boys and girls who probably managed to stay in school so long because they weren’t as pressured by their family to work or didn’t receive so much discrimination due to poverty. Almost certainly those who left school by the fourth grade were disadvantaged children who enrolled in first grade without having gone to preschool, came from homes with little or no formal education and had an insufficiently prepared teacher in first grade.

As of 2009, the rate of graduation from primary school didn’t exceed 50%. The data tell us that 220,000 boys and girls entered primary school that year, and it’s very probable that the next year, when it was time to go to second grade, approximately 40,000 had already dropped out. And the next year, when that same class moved up to third grade, some 70-80,000 were probably no longer attending. If the majority drops out in first and second grade, why not put the best teachers with the most training in first grade, to make it more attractive?

The problem of educability

Another national problem is what’s known as the educability of those who go to school—the characteristics of the child to be educated. Those characteristics have a relevant influence on learning, on the quality of the education obtained. Children are more educable if they’ve been well fed right from the time of the mother’s pregnancy, if there are books at home, if the parents are educated, if they’ve had age-appropriate stimuli since they were tiny and if they’ve received affection. A well-fed child from a home where there’s violence will be at a disadvantage relative to one who’s well fed and comes from a harmonious home. Those from a household where the mother barely got any schooling and can’t help with their homework or even read it are at a disadvantage. Those who live in homes where there’s nothing to read, not even a picture book, are also at a disadvantage in learning to read.

According to data cited by FUNIDES, chronic malnutrition in Nicaragua is 29.1%. Given that poverty is greater in the countryside, the malnutrition percentages there have to be even greater, which means that rural children have fewer chances of learning and present the teacher and the school with a greater challenge.

The first three years of a child’s life are crucial for his or her education. That’s why preschool education is so important. Approximately 55% of Nicaraguan children between three and five years old attend preschool, but the coverage among the Miskitu indigenous population of the Caribbean Coast is only 4%, according to a 2009 study by CIASES. Even the national coverage is below 10% among children under three.

Not only is the supply limited but the family culture doesn’t appreciate the value of preschool education or of games as an educational means. Many parents say, “What are children going to learn at that age? They just go to play there; it’s better for them to be at home.” But at home they are cared for by a young sister and there are no toys. Nor is there a culture of talking to children in many rural homes, because it’s assumed they don’t understand anything. Yet we now know that talking to children from the time they’re babies is fundamental to guaranteeing their later educability.

After that crucial age of zero to three years, the brain continues an accelerated development until around age eight, achieving 80% of its potential development by more or less that age. We continue learning after that, in fact throughout our life, but at a slower rate. Knowing all this, the education system should not only prioritize children from disadvantaged homes, but also offer ways to educate their families to change their nutrition and child-raising patterns and thus improve the children’s educability.

Reading comprehension is crucial

In 2010 a group of organizations and institutions, concerned about the low performance levels revealed in reading tests, kicked off a campaign called “Let’s all read” in memory of teacher Eduardo Báez, whose life’s passion was fostering pleasure in reading. We launched our campaign to get “distracted schools” to realize that reading comprehension is an essential ability because we saw that the current curriculum has reading as just a subject, part of what’s called “language and literature.” We focused the campaign on first grade because creating the right atmosphere for readers at that age and teaching them basic aspects of learning to read is more relevant than learning math. In fact those who can’t read comprehensively can’t later solve math problems.

We need to be able to read a number of words in order to comprehend what we read. According to neuroscience findings, children in first grade learning to read in Spanish should be able to read 30-35 words per minute by the end of that first year in school and comprehend what they read. If fluidity isn’t achieved in more or less that number of words, the chance of improving it in second grade drops, because the brain has windows that open and, while they don’t totally close, they don’t open as easily with the passage of time.

In second grade children should be reading more or less 60 words per minute. The tests to measure this use texts with simple monosyllabic or disyllabic words, and only a few with three syllables. Nobody would make them read sentences like “Dinosaurs were extinguished in the Jurassic period.” Fun stories are used with common, concrete, simple words, and after reading them the children are asked three or four simple questions to see if they understood what they read.

We did the campaign in 96 schools in 2010. That year, in line with the requisites of the examination, which is cooperative, only 2 schools “won,” i.e. 80% of their first grade pupils were reading 25 words per minute at the end of the school year. Last year we expanded the number of schools to 147, covering some 5,000 children, and only 3 schools won. That indicates how much we still have to do in this crucial issue of reading comprehension. The importance of children learning to read and write in the first primary grades and of learning to think logically and develop study habits and scientific curiosity must be put on the public agenda. If our poorest children don’t learn to read today, when their cognitive conditions are optimal, tomorrow we will have civically dead children who can’t take advantage of the technological advances the information era has opened up to us.

We urgently need more of everything

In summary, to ensure that children learn with quality, we need to stimulate the best teachers. We need to increase the number of classrooms where teaching the essential things is basic. We need directors capable of good pedagogical management, not just good administrative control. We need educational planning to choose from the curriculum the most important skills for continued learning, so that they learn what is most essential and learn it well. We need an evaluation that allows us to anticipate the types of problems that will be faced in the classrooms, above all with disadvantaged students. This needs to be a constructive evaluation that doesn’t sanction and whose results are made known. We need teachers to work with affection in the classroom, to concentrate all their energies on getting the children to learn and fostering a reading environment in the school. And we need to ensure that all schools at least have latrines.

All of this is necessary. It’s all urgent. Nicaraguan society has many organizations that support education. Multiple campaigns are initiated to improve educational quality, but it’s not enough; the efforts and their impact have to be increased. We all need to join together independent of religious beliefs and political sympathies to correct our system’s deficiencies to avoid them costing us the future, to devote all our energies to working for Nicaragua and its boys and girls.

Vanessa Castro has taught both children and adults and researched educational processes for decades.

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