Four Keys to Cuba's Provision of High-Quality Public Education

• In Event: Global Education Reform: How Privatization Versus Public Investment Influences Education Outcomes

Abstract

Cuba is a rather lower income country even by Latin American standards. The Cuban economy is run by the state and the Cuban bureaucracy does a mediocre job of it, even taking into account the fifty plus years of a United States economic blockade. But somehow the Cuban education system is the envy of the rest of Latin America. Cuban elementary pupils score much higher in math and language tests than children in other Latin American countries.

What makes students in Cuba so proficient in mathematics and reading? To begin with, the parents of the children in school in Cuba are relatively well educated, violence in the schools is extremely low, few children work outside the home, and income distribution is very equal in Cuba. But beyond these more favorable social conditions, Cuban education is a cut above the others in Latin America, better than in richer Uruguay and Costa Rica (the highest performing of the other countries in the region).

Cuban children attend schools intensely focused on instruction and staffed by well-trained, regularly supervised teachers in a social environment dedicated to high academic achievement for all social groups. Combining high-quality teaching with high academic expectations and a tightly controlled school management hierarchy with well-defined goals makes the Cuban system work and distinguishes Cuban education from other systems in Latin America. In essence, Cuban education gives most Cuban pupils a primary education that only upper-middle-class children receive in other Latin American countries.

A six-year study analyzing the quality of elementary mathematics teachers in five Latin American countries, including Cuba, generated the following four lessons about Cuba’s success: 1) state-generated social capital matters; 2) curriculum matters, but its implementation depends on teacher capacity; 3) teacher education needs to be practice-based and tightly coordinated with existing curriculum, a process that does not occur spontaneously; and 4) instructional leadership and supervision is key to improving instruction – market incentives are no substitute for good management.

Despite advantages in these four areas, the Cuban system also has obvious severe drawbacks, especially in the lack of political freedom and limits on individual choice. However, the path to better education in democratic societies need not be a turn to authoritarianism. The lessons drawn from the Cuban experience do suggest, however, that the state has be much more of a guarantor of quality education for all – the state needs to take public responsibility for children’s success. This presentation will further explain these Cuban lessons within the context of the larger symposium questions of how to learn about different ways of investing in education.

Author

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University