Education 3: Why so little teaching and learning?
Author: Jane Wreford | Publlished in 2003
Big-city schools throughout the world are in trouble. Failure to learn is a common problem among poor urban children. Reforms have been frustrated by education bureaucracies, teachers'unions, disagreement over strategies and erratic leadership and funding. A study by the Brookings Institution in Washington argued that "policy churn and leadership turn-over confound even the most highly-regarded efforts to institutionalize reform efforts," adding that "urban school performance is so miserable that no one can be justified in encouraging delay in addressing the problems of school quality until the solutions to all other youth and family problems were in hand". São Paulo is a special problem because of political indifference, the challenge of managing such a huge and disorderly school system and the longterm social and economic
consequences of failure to learn. The Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics asked Jane Wreford of British Audit Commission to investigate these problems.