Una escuela en México durante unas vacaciones. / EL PAÍS
La inversión en educación es, sin duda, una de las más rentables del mundo. Sin embargo, el gasto público en educación inicial por estudiante latinoamericano es apenas un tercio que en las naciones desarrolladas.
En México, el gasto anual en instituciones públicas de educación infantil (desde los 3 años) por estudiante fue de 2.217 dólares en 2010. En Argentina, fue de 2.427 dólares y en Brasil de 2.111 en el mismo año. Por contraste la media de la OCDE fue de 6.275 dólares en 2010, según cálculos de la propia organización.
Estas cifras y unas evidencias científicas desalentadoras llevan a los expertos a recomendar que se dedique más recursos a los primeros años de vida porque “los niños no están aprendiendo mucho, y eso ocurre porque entran en la escuela con rezagos muy grandes”, como es el caso de México, de acuerdo a Ciro Avitabile, experto en educación del Banco Mundial.
Esos rezagos –afirma- son de tipo cognitivo, es decir la capacidad de concentración o de memorizar palabras por ejemplo, y hasta no-cognitivos, cómo son la capacidad de superar retos o el hecho de tener autocontrol. Los estudios demuestran que hasta un 80% de la arquitectura cerebral se desarrolla durante los 1.000 primeros días de vida de un ser humano. Y en esta etapa es más fácil cerrar las brechas que se hacen evidentes más adelante -por ejemplo en secundaria- entre niños ricos y pobres, o entre niños de la ciudad y del campo.
Conscientes de esta problemática, los gobiernos de la región están realizando un arduo trabajo de formación infantil que empieza prácticamente desde antes del nacimiento.
Lo viven en carne propia Enedelia Maya Castañeda y sus tres hijos.
La joven madre del municipio de Agua Blanca, en Hidalgo, participa con entusiasmo en los talleres que organiza el Consejo Nacional de Fomento Educativo (CONAFE) sobre la importancia de estimular y jugar con los niños para que aprendan habilidades básicas en los primeros años de vida. En los talleres dónde cantan, juegan o aprenden números, colores y formas, y también se instruye a las madres y los padres, se atiende a alrededor de 460.000 niños y niñas en comunidades rurales o marginadas de México. El Banco Mundial apoyadesde hace varios años el trabajo de CONAFE.
Más ganancias que en la bolsa
No se trata únicamente del conocidísimo lugar común de que educarse es bueno para el futuro, sino que hay números contantes y sonantes que confirman por qué es fundamental la educación en los primeros años de vida.
Una análisis del programa Perry de Educación Preescolar para familias de bajos recursos en EE UU encontró, por ejemplo, que si se invierten 100 dólares en la educación de un niño de entre 0 y 4 años, esa inversión tiene un retorno promedio entre 7 y 10 dólares anuales, tomando en cuenta los mejores resultados laborales y una menor tasa de criminalidad. La misma cantidad invertida en el mercado de valores daría una ganancia promedia de 6.9 dólares anuales.
Este razonamiento funciona también cuando se compara la educación inicial, ya no con la bolsa, sino con la inversión en educación primaria o secundaria, por ejemplo. “De todas las inversiones que se pueden hacer en educación, la educación inicial tiene el retorno más alto”, explica Avitabile.
Los esfuerzos en los primeros años de vida significan que estas personas tendrán mejores oportunidades de estudio, acceso a mejores empleos y evitarán que muchos de ellos caigan en la violencia o el crimen organizado. Se trata, por lo tanto, de una inversión rentable para las personas y para la sociedad.
Desde algunos años se está prestando más atención a este tema. Hay varios ejemplos en la región. En Argentina: un programa del gobierno se está enfocando en la educación en comunidades rurales, incluyendo la educación infantil. Con mejores equipos, infraestructura y capacitación de docentes en las escuelas, los niños reciben también más oportunidades.
Además, para que todas las madres y sus hijos reciban también el seguimiento médico necesario, el programa NACER da servicio médico gratuito a los niños hasta los 6 años y madres que no están asegurados. En Jamaica, por otro lado, un “pasaporte” para el desarrollo infantil permitirá seguir el desarrollo de los niños. Originalmente concebida solamente para la salud, la estrategia consiste en seguir el desarrollo del niño de su primera revisión prenatal hasta la educación preprimaria. El pasaporte cuenta con contribuciones médicas y educativas de profesionales.
En Chile, el sistema "Crece Contigo" monitorea a los niños desde el crecimiento prenatal hasta que ingresen a la escuela a los 5 años de edad. Asimismo, en Ecuador está el programa Creciendo con nuestras guaguas para enseñar a los padres a vigilar los progresos en salud y nutrición hasta los cinco años.
To hear executives at inBloom tell it, their $100 million education technology start-up is shutting down after only 15 months of operation because it was too far ahead of its time.
The seed money for this nonprofit corporation came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York. InBloom aimed to streamline personalized learning — analyzing information about individual students to customize lessons to them — in public schools. It planned to collect and integrate student attendance, assessment, disciplinary and other records from disparate school-district databases, put the information in cloud storage and release it to authorized web services and apps that could help teachers track each student’s progress.
But the program ran into strident opposition from a number of parents and privacy advocates. They warned that school district officials were unequipped to manage, or even audit, how outside vendors might use delicate material — like a student’s disability status. The resistance culminated a few weeks ago, when the New York State Legislature passed a budget that prohibited state education officials from releasing student data to amalgamators like inBloom.
A promotional video from inBloom imagined how teachers and students could utilize its technology within the next decade.
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On Monday, Iwan Streichenberger, inBloom’s chief executive, portrayed his enterprise as a victim of erroneous censure — and announced that it was folding.
“The use of technology to tailor instruction for individual students is still an emerging concept and inBloom provides a technical solution that has never been seen before,” he wrote in a letter posted on the inBloom site. “As a result, it has been the subject of mischaracterizations and a lightning rod for misdirected criticisms.”
Start-ups, of course, habitually flop. Because of inBloom’s pedigree backing, however, it became a symbol of the push to technologize education.
“I think other companies have been happy to let inBloom take the punches because it deflects attention away from what they are doing,” Doug Levin, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, a nonprofit membership group, told me last week. “Now, with inBloom closing, it is going to raise broader questions, as it should, about the practices of the industry as a whole.”
(Mr. Levin’s group receives financing from Google for Education, Microsoft, Pearson and other companies.)
Indeed, inBloom’s implosion is a cautionary tale for the nearly $8 billion business of prekindergarten-through-12th-grade education technology software. Some education veterans told me that inBloom’s demise indicated that the industry had been rushing to sell data-driven concepts before establishing evidence that automated data-mining of students improved their success in school.
“If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” asks Ken Mitchell, the superintendent of the South Orangetown Central School District in Blauvelt, N.Y.
InBloom became a flash point for questions dogging the industry: How does the profit motive tally with public education? How responsible are companies for student data privacy? What if Congress updates the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a 40-year-old student privacy law, to keep pace with innovation?
For years, school districts have collected details about students and shared them with outside vendors — for instance, providing school bus companies with information on students’ physical disabilities. The federal student education privacy law allows this type of data-sharing under an exception permitting schools to outsource school functions to third parties.
But many parents weren’t aware of the practice until they discovered that inBloom made it possible to categorize students with sensitive labels: Autistic. Tardy. A.D.H.D. Removed by child protective services. Parent in military. Homeless. Pregnant. Witness. Perpetrator. Victim.
To some parents, inBloom’s aims seemed conflicted. It proposed to serve as the gatekeeper of this volatile personal information — all the while offering to aid the software industry. It planned to provide a standardized data platform around which vendors could create products to market to multiple districts.
“We are not creating commercial apps,” Mr. Streichenberger, the inBloom chief, told me in a phone interview last year. “Our role is to sit in the middle, to facilitate that innovation.” He added: “There are tools that come in, mine and analyze the data and make recommendations.”
Given inBloom’s challenges, some companies are emphasizing that they have a different business model. Consider eScholar, which sells data warehousing software to about 5,000 school districts across the country. This 17-year-old company doesn’t repurpose student data for other ventures. In fact, eScholar doesn’t store student records; schools run its software and aggregate student data on their own sites.
“It is for us a tremendous sense of clarity that we are getting paid by educators to do what they need done,” Shawn Bay, eScholar’s chief executive, told me.
InBloom also ran into opposition because it seemed intended to maximize data collection — while leaving it up to school officials to decide which student information to upload and which companies should be allowed access to it.
“All of the decisions about what data is stored and what applications are approved and what users can see that data in those applications are all a local customer decision,” Sharren Bates, an inBloom executive, said last year.
A subsequent study by researchers at Fordham Law School in Manhattan concluded that schools weren’t prepared to navigate the issue on their own: Some had signed contracts with vendors without specifying the kinds of student information they could collect or limiting its use.
“There need to be rules of the road,” said Mr. Levin at the state education technology directors group. “I think the inBloom case establishes that we don’t know what the rules of the road are.”
El sagrado concepto 'neutralidad de la Red', que el martes aprobó el senado brasileño, dos días después no aparece en el documento final firmado en la NETMundial, el encuentro global sobre la gobernanza en Internet que reunió en Brasil a 800 representantes de 85 países.
El documento condena la llamada “vigilancia masiva” en Internet y también hace un llamamiento a que esta sea perseguida según la legislación internacional, en alusión al escándalo Snowden. Pero no incluyó ni una sola mención a la NSA (Agencia Nacional de Seguridad estadounidense), encargada de espiar a Gobiernos aliados, empresas privadas y ciudadanos anónimos, entre ellos, la propia presidenta brasileña Dilma Rousseff.
La inclusión del concepto de 'neutralidad' (que todos los servicios de Internet tengan el mismo acceso y a la misma velocidad, sin preferencias) atrasó varias horas el consenso en torno a la llamada Declaración de Sao Paulo.
Este movimiento se producía justo 24 horas después de que la Comisión Federal de Comunicaciones (FCC), el organismo independiente encargado de la regulación de la web en Estados Unidos, anunciara que revisaría la normativa actual para facilitar que los proveedores de Internet ofrezcan servicios a diferentes velocidades. Las divergencias de opiniones entre Brasilia y Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea impidieron sacar adelante un texto más ambicioso.El documento, de apenas 10 páginas, es un pálido reflejo de la que para muchos era una cumbre histórica, celebrada en un país —Brasil— que acababa de aprobar la primera Constitución de Internet. En la llamada Ley de Marco Civil, precisamente, la neutralidad era uno de los caballos de batalla del Gobierno brasileño.
En declaraciones a la prensa, Paulo Bernardo, el ministro brasileño de Comunicaciones, admitió estas diferencias y aseguró que confiaba en obtener más adelante el derecho a que todos tengan acceso a los mismos contenidos y con la misma velocidad. “Hay países que no lo quieren. Estados Unidos. Tampoco la Unión Europea”, dijo y se remitió a la reunión que se celebrará en Estambul (Turquía) del Foro Global de Internet (GIF). “Hay diferentes opiniones”, aseguró la vicepresidenta de la Comisión Europea, Neelie Kroes.
Para ciertos especialistas, como Sergio Amadeu, sociólogo que participó en la redacción del Marco Civil, lo que se ha producido es una gran victoria de las grandes empresas de telecomunicaciones (operadoras telefónicas y del cable) sobre las de Internet (Google, Facebook, Twitter...). “Todo esto es un absurdo”, aseguró Amadeu. “Los lobbies de las empresas de telecomunicaciones dominaron y presionaron durante los debates finales y consiguieron debilitar el texto y sacar la palabra neutralidad de la redacción”.
La Unión Europea es partidaria de la neutralidad de Internet, pero en Brasil se quedó sin cumplir sus deseos, pese a que varios de sus países han legislado claramente en favor de ese concepto.
La comisaria de la Agenda Digital, Neelie Kroes, siempre se ha mostrado una “firme defensora” de ella. "Pero entiende que en dos días no es posible consensuar este concepto”, explicó su portavoz. Kroes se alegra, al menos, de que el tema hubiera salido en la cumbre, aunque reconoce que el documento “no es el comunicado firme que algunos querrían”, informa Lucía Abellán
Los representantes de Cuba, India y Rusia (cuyo presidente, Vladímir Putin, acaba de comparar a Internet con un instrumento de la CIA) mostraron su disconformidad con el documento final. “Se ignoraron nuestras aportaciones y lo único que va a pasar es que se va a fomentar la desigualdad entre los países”. Ante la polémica generada, los representantes de Estados Unidos en la cumbre, Michael Daniel y Lawrence Strickling, coordinador de Seguridad Cibernética de la Casa Blanca y secretario adjunto de Comercio, respectivamente, justificaron en la Folha de São Paulo la postura de Washington, asegurando que “neutralidad significa cosas diferentes en lugares diferentes”.
Lo único en claro de la cumbre es que EE UU ha confirmado que renuncia a la prerrogativa de atribución de dominios en Internet a través del ICANN y a una reestructuración de su servicio de información NSA.
Mary Ann Carlson with pupils at a charter school in Washington run by KIPP, an organization aided by the Walton foundation.CreditGabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — DC Prep operates four charter schools here with 1,200 students in preschool through eighth grade. The schools, whose students are mostly poor and black, are among the highest performing in Washington. Last year, DC Prep’s flagship middle school earned the best test scores among local charter schools, far outperforming the average of the city’s traditional neighborhood schools as well.
Another, less trumpeted, distinction for DC Prep is the extent to which it — as well as many other charter schools in the city — relies on the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart.
Since 2002, the charter network has received close to $1.2 million from Walton in direct grants. A Walton-funded nonprofit helped DC Prep find building space when it moved its first two schools from a chapel basement into former warehouses that now have large classrooms and wide, art-filled hallways.
One-third of DC Prep’s teachers are alumni of Teach for America, whose largest private donor is Walton. A Walton-funded advocacy group fights for more public funding and autonomy for charter schools in the city. Even the local board that regulates charter schools receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
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Nate Hanna at Washington’s Mundo Verde school, a foundation recipient.CreditGabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
In effect, Walton has subsidized an entire charter school system in the nation’s capital, helping to fuel enrollment growth so that close to half of all public school students in the city now attend charters, which receive taxpayer dollars but are privately operated.
Walton’s investments here are a microcosm of its spending across the country. The foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants nationally to educational efforts since 2000, making it one of the largest private contributors to education in the country. It is one of a handful of foundations with strong interests in education, including those belonging to Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft; Eli Broad, a Los Angeles insurance billionaire; and Susan and Michael Dell, who made their money in computers. The groups have many overlapping interests, but analysts often describe Walton as following a distinct ideological path.
In addition to giving grants to right-leaning think tanks like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Walton foundation hired an education program officer who had worked at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business-backed group. Walton has also given to centrist organizations such as New Leaders for New Schools, a group co-founded by Jon Schnur, a former senior adviser to President Obama’s transition team and to Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.
In 2013, the Walton foundation spent more than $164 million across the country. According to Marc Sternberg, who was appointed director of K-12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation last September, Walton has given grants to one in every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335 million.
“The Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families with high quality choices,” said Mr. Sternberg. “We believe that in providing choices we are also compelling the other schools in an ecosystem to raise their game.”
The supporters and critics of charter schools, many of them fierce, cannot be easily divided into political camps. Supporters include both Republicans and Democrats, although critics tend to come more from the left. In Washington, where the charter system has strong backing in City Hall, supporters have been more successful than in New York, where opposition from teachers unions and others has kept charter school enrollment to about 6 percent, despite growth in the past decade.
The size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize influence on education policy as well as on which schools flourish and which are forced to fold. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel some of the fastest growing, and most divisive, trends in public education — including teacher evaluations based on student test scores and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.
“The influence of philanthropy in terms of the bang for the buck they get is just really kind of shocking,” said Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
A separate Walton foundation that supports higher education bankrolls an academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty, several of whom were recruited from conservative think tanks, conduct research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the foundation supports.
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A class at Junior High School 118 in the Bronx led by Pamela Paniagua of the Walton-backed Teach for America.CreditÁngel Franco/The New York Times
Last year, the Walton Family Foundation gave $478,380 to a fund affiliated with the Chicago public schools to help officials conduct community meetings to discuss their plan to close more than 50 schools at a time when charters were expanding in the city.
And Walton played a role in a recent battle in New York, giving a grant to a charter advocacy group that helped pay for advertisements attacking Mayor Bill de Blasio after he denied public space to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a network in which students have gotten high scores on standardized tests.
While charter schools and vouchers may benefit those families that attend these schools, there may be unintended effects on the broader public school system.
Grant recipients say Walton injects entrepreneurial energy into public education and helps groups eager to try new ideas move more quickly than they could if they relied solely on publicly managed bureaucracies. Thousands of children, they say, attend better schools because of options Walton supports.
“The supply of new models and new ideas is really important, and so I think it’s a very positive thing,” said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, of the Walton investments. Neither Dr. Pianta nor the Curry School have received funding from Walton.
Critics say that Walton backs schools and measures that take public dollars — and, some say, the most motivated families — away from the existing public schools, effectively creating a two-tier educational system that could hurt the students most in need.
Although Walmart opened its first two stores in the nation’s capital just last December after a protracted battle over the retailer’s wages, the Walton Family Foundation has played a role in steering the direction of public education in the city for more than a decade. Since 2000, the foundation has invested more than $80 million here, not only in charter schools but also in support of taxpayer-funded vouchers for students to attend private schools. It poured millions into a controversial overhaul of tenure, the implementation of stricter teacher evaluation systems and the introduction of performance pay in the district’s public schools.
Walton also supports measures that labor leaders say undermine union protections for teachers. Like-minded Walton recipients are working together in many cases, so there are few dissenting voices.
“When lots of charter schools open up, it’s like a new Walmart store moving in,” said Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado in Boulder. “You could look at it and say, ‘Well, the schools in a community are losing families because of healthy competition the same way that the hardware store is losing customers because of healthy competition.’ But that doesn’t take into account the long-term harms to the community, which are probably greater than any short-term benefit.”
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Walton’s Marc Sternberg does not apologize for the foundation’s focus on charter schools. "What’s the argument there?" he said. "Don’t help anybody until you can help everybody?"CreditGabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
In addition to the foundation’s activities, many individual members of the Walton family have made millions of dollars in campaign donations to candidates for local school boards and state legislatures who support causes funded by the foundation.
Walton’s largest recipients include the Charter School Growth Fund, which helps charter school networks expand ($101.6 million since 2000); Teach for America, which recruits high-achieving college graduates for two-year teaching stints in poor districts and now places about a third of its corps members in charter schools ($67.2 million); KIPP, one of the country’s best-known and largest charter school networks ($58.7 million); the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocate for private school vouchers ($18.4 million), whose board includes Carrie Penner, a member of the Walton family; and GreatSchools Inc., an online schools information database ($15.5 million.)
Last year, the foundation announced a two-year, $8 million grant to StudentsFirst, an advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington who oversaw many of the policy changes funded by Walton in the district’s public schools. StudentsFirst now pushes for the extension of many of those same policies in states across the country, contributing to the campaigns of lawmakers who support the group’s agenda.
“What they’re doing in terms of education is they’re trying to create an alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American democracy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Although the foundation’s leaders say they are focused on helping children in poverty or stuck in low-performing schools, some of their actions support concepts regardless of whether poor children benefit. In 2012, for example, Walton gave $300,000 to the Douglas County School District in Colorado to help it fight a lawsuit brought by opponents of a voucher program. The median income of families in the district, where the public schools are high performing, is more than $99,000, according to census data.
Walton supporters say the foundation is not blindly supporting the expansion of charters. Two years ago, Walton announced a $5.2 million grant to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to support an initiative under which the group would push state and local regulators to close about 900 low-performing charter schools around the country, while opening another 2,000.
“Any foundation that invests the money has to ask themselves, is their money impacting the system as a whole?” said Dennis Van Roeckel, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.
Walton’s Mr. Sternberg, who started his career in Teach for America and founded the Bronx Lab School, a public school in New York City, does not apologize for Walton’s commitment to charter schools and vouchers. “What’s the argument there?” he said during an interview. “Don’t help anybody until you can help everybody?”
He said the foundation was focused not on ideology but on results, a word he repeated many times.
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A student worked at Mundo Verde.CreditGabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
In Washington, for example, the group has given more than $5.8 million to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, whose members are nominated by the mayor to regulate the opening and closing of charter schools. The board has used Walton’s grants to help develop accountability measures for all charter schools in the city. When critics complained that charters were pushing out difficult students, the board began reviewing and publishing data on expulsions and midyear departures. Scott Pearson, executive director of the board, said charter schools in the city had halved expulsions since the board began releasing statistics.
“D.C. is a better place today than it was 10 years ago because of the reforms that have played out here,” said Mr. Sternberg, who was an official in the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He pointed to recent increases in scores on national tests by both public and charter school students, saying that neighborhood schools had responded to competition from charters. “And maybe in very small part, because of Walton’s role,” he added.
Walton has become a go-to source for many charter schools seeking start-up grants. In addition to funding large networks like KIPP, which is expanding in Washington, the foundation has given grants to several stand-alone schools.
The Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts, housed in a building across the street from the Washington Navy Yard in the southeast part of the city, received $250,000 from Walton in 2011. The school used the money to buy computers for students, as well as chemistry lab equipment and recording gear for the school’s media studio.
All of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized free or reduced price lunches. According to Marco Clark, the founder and head of the school, one in five students have special needs and one in 10 have been involved with the criminal justice system.
On a recent morning, the range of academic abilities in the school was apparent. In an advanced placement world history class, 11th-graders gave rapid-fire answers to questions about Native American tribes, with the teacher asking “Why?” to gauge whether students were merely regurgitating memorized facts. Upstairs, in an eighth-grade reading class, several students asked the teacher for help in understanding a passage about the world’s largest harp. One boy struggled to eke out what he thought was the main point. “It about how can orchastra works,” he wrote.
Several students noted that they had come from schools in which they either did not feel safe or were not learning much. Dr. Clark acknowledged that the school was still working to raise test scores, and had added extra math and reading classes.
“Those who want to criticize any philanthropy group for giving money to kids to change their futures,” said Dr. Clark, “there’s something wrong with them.”
Some parents said they felt torn between the interests of their children and those of the city. Marcus Robinson, the owner of a pet supply and grooming business, said he had attended public schools in Washington and wanted his children to do the same. But his daughters Lourdes, 8, and Maja, 6, attend Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, a start-up that received $250,000 from Walton.
Mr. Robinson was concerned that the schools in his northeastern neighborhood had trouble coping with students who had behavioral problems. He also liked the dual language approach at Mundo Verde, where students work in small classes on projects related to the environment and sustainability. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the classrooms, and a yoga teacher and nutritionist are on the faculty.
“Charter schools are a bit of a disservice to the public schools,” Mr. Robinson said. “It puts the onus on public schools to take on the people and children that other schools don’t want. But in the meantime, between everyone fighting about it, I did not want my kids to be caught in the limbo.”
