Latin America’s Teachers Are Pandemic’s Unsung Heroes

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The novel coronavirus has brought out the worst in Latin American politics. How else to explain Brazil and Mexico, whose what-me-worry leaders preside over nations that account for more than one in five global fatalities? Yet for all the official heels on call, plenty of heroes toil below — perhaps none so invisibly as the legion of educators who have been forced to reinvent their jobs almost overnight to reach 160 million students shut out of classrooms since March.

Like the more celebrated essential workers in public health, teachers know how unevenly the burden of the outbreak has fallen on society. While the well-heeled young metropolitan scholars log on to class from the comforts of Zoom, their less fortunate peers make do with printed worksheets that they must fetch often from distant schoolhouse or pray for a Wi-Fi signal on cheap mobile phones.

Wesley Campos knows the drill. Growing up in a remote patch of the Brazilian midwest — so remote locals call it Acaba Vida (Life’s End) — he used to ride 240 kilometers a day to and from school. As municipal education secretary of Niquelandia, pop. 42,000 to 45,000 (no one knows for sure), he now oversees 3,293 homebound students scattered along 12,500 kilometers of country roads.

Some of Niquelandia’s public schoolers live so far from town that teachers must make house calls to deliver books and printouts of lesson plans. Home computers and tablets are scarce and internet connections, where they exist, are slow and iffy. So Campos and the faculty at 21 municipal schools came up with a low-tech workaround. Each teacher created a study group on WhatsApp, the ubiquitous phone app that Latin Americans swear by, where students pick up their assignments by text, audio messages and short videos, and send back completed lessons the same way. It’s less than ideal. One student has to climb to a hilltop to get a clean phone signal.

In thousands of towns like Niquelandia, on the wrong side of Latin America’s digital divide, such analog hacks are the only recourse for keeping students engaged and learning, and preventing them from falling irretrievably behind. While 26 of the 33 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean tap web-based learning platforms, almost as many (24) also rely on offline solutions, including radio, broadcast television and printed lessons, the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) concluded in the recent survey “Education in the Time of Covid-19.” Just eight nations in the region provide their students with computers or tablets appropriate for interactive distance learning.

Even where the latest technology is available, societies have failed to share the benefits equally. While 70% to 80% of students among families in the top income quartile have laptops at home, only 10% to 20% of those in the bottom earning quartile of society do, ECLAC found. What’s worse, some 80 million school-age Latin Americans (51% of the total) struggle to learn in crowded and deficient homes.

Digital inequity worsens the lopsided social cost of schooling, as students with limited access to the latest learning tools are most at risk of falling behind, or worse. The United Nations estimates that 3.13 million Latin American and Caribbean students from preschoolers to university are at risk of dropping out due to the fallout from COVID-19, almost 13% of the global total. Nearly two thirds of the potential dropouts are secondary schoolers or younger.

Yet one of the lessons of the pandemic is that even the best gadgets fall short. Just as nurses and physicians soldier on the frontlines of Covid-19, teachers are the first responders of Latin America’s educational emergency, making sure that even the most disadvantaged children from underserved communities can keep learning. “The global health crisis has shown that you can’t replace teachers in the classroom with remote education,” Daniela Trucco, senior social affairs officer with ECLAC’s social development division. “Students sitting still in front of a screen for hours at a time are not the same thing.”

A growing number of towns have taken that to heart, with new methods and old. In Tres Marias, pop. 32,700, in southeastern Brazil, teachers and even education secretary Cleria Maria de Oliveira Melo take turns reading Brazilian classics, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty to grade-schoolers over the community radio.

In Matias Barbosa (14,500 inhabitants), teachers take to WhatsApp to track their far-flung pupils and help them to solve problems. To reach any stragglers, the town deploys sound trucks to remind parents to pick up student lesson plans at the local schoolhouse. “At first, we didn’t know if this was going to work,” said municipal education secretary Simone Guedes Janeiro. Six months on, the hands-on method not only has kept the town’s nearly 1,380 public schoolers up to speed but also attracted a growing number of their peers from better equipped private schools, who have grown disenchanted with hours on end of online classes. “Studying online alone is not the answer.”

In Niquelandia, secretary Campos is pushing to convert town squares into public Wi-Fi hotspots — where students can gather to download class assignments while maintaining social distancing — while teachers from 21 public schools are working the phones and shoe leather to check in on their scattered students. Even Campos’s mother, a retired teacher, has joined the effort, going door to door to visit 90 students in one district. “Despite the difficulties, she reported that they’re all keeping up,” said Campos.

“The challenges are enormous,” says Claudia Costin, a former World Bank education expert who directs the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies at Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation. “But in Brazil, where we still don’t have connectivity for everyone, we are managing to sustain teaching and learning amid adversity, in a situation no one was prepared for.”

While no one claims that pen, paper and house calls are enough, teachers across the region are stepping up to keep students learning and to prevent education from becoming another casualty of the all too familiar Latin American tragedy of them versus us.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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