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Cuba's Academic Advantage

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures...................................................................................................viiList of Tables....................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...................................................................................................xi1. Context Matters................................................................................................12. Three Educational Systems in Three Social Contexts.............................................................183. Understanding Why School Achievement Varies....................................................................454. Comparing Academic Performance in Cuba and Other Latin American Countries......................................565. The Long Road from Curriculum Construction to Student Learning.................................................786. Opportunity to Learn and Teaching Patterns.....................................................................1127. Lessons Learned................................................................................................141Appendix A: Production Function Estimates of Student Achievement in Latin America, by Country.....................161Appendix B: Definitions of Terms Used in Chapter 6 and Task Analysis Guide........................................180Notes.............................................................................................................185References........................................................................................................193Index.............................................................................................................201

Chapter One

Some towns, regions, and countries seem to have better education than others. The students in those schools do better on tests, are more likely to finish high school, and are more likely to seek higher education. We know that these outcomes are not just the result of better teachers and better administered schools, or even more money for supplies and extra programs. The students who go to better schools usually have families who are more highly educated and are hooked into networks that both reinforce the notion that doing well in school is important and know the best strategies for succeeding at school.

There is another reason for young people doing better in school that might be just as important as high-quality school personnel, supportive families, and family networks. Some communities, regions, and even countries have created environments and networks that-beyond families-help young people want to be academically successful and facilitate strategies that encourage them to achieve success.

This book is about education in one country-Cuba-where even elementary school pupils from rural areas seem to learn more than pupils from middle-class urban families in the rest of Latin America. This achievement is all the more remarkable because Cuba is fairly poor in natural resources and has low levels of material consumption. Yet Cuba has school and social support systems that help a very large percentage of pupils reach high levels of academic achievement.

The reasons for Cuba's academic success that emerge from this study will please some educators but displease others. The reasons certainly conflict with political philosophies stressing individual freedom and decentralized pluralistic democracy. Many of the reasons revolve around a social context of schools that is highly supportive of academic achievement. Most educators, no matter what their political philosophy, realize how important that kind of environment is for a good educational system or school. But Cuba creates this social context mainly through a hierarchical centralized government bureaucracy, not through individual families acting alone or collectively at a local level by attending school board meetings or church services. Indeed, while Cuban classrooms stress a child-centered approach to learning, the Cuban state strictly enforces the implementation of curriculum and these child-centered teaching methods through a chain of command that begins with the minister of education and ends with directors and assistant directors of schools supervising teachers in their classrooms and teachers feeling competent and responsible to deliver a well-defined national curriculum.

The Cuban experience raises important questions for education in all countries, including highly developed ones such as the United States. How responsible should governments be for creating environments that help children focus on academic achievement? How much autonomy should teachers and schools have over what goes on in classrooms? Is there a trade-off between the value that market societies place on individual choice and on the value they place on ensuring that all children-regardless of socioeconomic background-receive high-quality schooling?

Caring about Academic Achievement

Fifty years ago in America, getting good grades in school and scoring high on tests was important but not critical to life chances. Almost everyone who had a "good" job was a white male, so competition for those jobs was not nearly as stiff as it is today. There was also a lot of well-paying manufacturing work around. High school (male, mainly white) graduates and even some dropouts had access to that kind of work, and they earned nearly as much as people who were college trained.

Intellectuals were certainly concerned about the quality of schooling, but they situated academic achievement and attainment, particularly for the poor, in the larger issues of poverty and discrimination. We knew that suburban children went to good schools because their families paid higher property taxes, and we knew that black children in the South went to schools that were segregated, terribly underfunded, and probably not very likely places to pick up advanced mathematics. Thanks to Blackboard Jungle, a Glenn Ford-Sidney Poitier film of the 1950s, we also knew that inner-city high schools were rough places, attended by gangs who cared little about anything academic. Everything we thought about education suggested that the main problem was outside the school-the influences of a society in which the middle class could spend more than the less affluent on their children's public education, where whites discriminated against blacks, and where poor city kids were subjected to what sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb called the "hidden injuries of class," resulting in anti-academic, anti-school behavior among urban youth (Sennett and Cobb, 1973).

This view of education has changed. In the past generation, a great urgency has developed over students' school success, and with it, an urgency both to blame the schools for society's ills and to insist on improving how well schools teach pupils what they need to learn. The change results partly from schools' success itself. In the United States and all over the world, a lot more young people are finishing high school and college than ever before. Many more are competing for professional jobs. Once women and minorities began getting hired in jobs previously reserved for white men, everyone became...