Sunday, June 22, 2008

Education - What's up with Cuba?

On Friday the UNESCO's Latin America office released the report on an evaluation of the performance of 3rd and 6th graders in math, reading, and science.
There's is a huge amount of very interesting information, both in the executive summary
and the entire report (10MB pdf) (onfortunately both in Spanish only).
The usual suspects do pretty well - Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay. Argentina doesn't do as well as it used to (and people here are pretty concerned - rightly so).
And then there's Cuba, which doesn't beat, but crushes the competition. On every single imaginable count: They have higher average performances, their top 10% are light years better than the "elite" anywhere else and the lowest quartile still does better than the average of most other countries. Cuba has one of the smallest urban/rural divides and has a girls performing much better than in most other places (slightly better than boys in math and science, significantly better in reading, as is common in such stories).
Above, two of the report's graphs to illustrate (but all others look similar):


I'm not quite sure what to make of this - obviously there is a chance that the Cuban government tried to game the system for propaganda purposes, but that does seem quite unlikely given the look of this (you'd expect smaller rather than larger variation with cheating).
One of the things that always seems to come out of education testing is that not just do more equal countries tend to do better (no big surprise there), but - and I think that really is a surprise - the top students in more equal societies outperform their highly privileged counterparts in countries like Chile or Brazil.

A final thought - if Cuba were to move towards a more market driven system (and my guess would be that if that happens it will be along the lines of China's or Vietnam's gradual reforms) it should be in a very good position for a dramatic economic catch-up.

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