🇧🇷 Secrets of Sobral's Success

In 12 years, a city in rural Brazil became the top-performing system nation-wide. What did they do right?

EdWell is back! Over the next year, I’m on a journey to tell stories of ed leaders in Colombia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Indonesia. First stop: Brazil. For jobs and other resources, check out my LinkedIn posts. With any feedback, hit reply. - Kat

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Sobral primary classroom (photo by Rosangela Novaes Martins).

The road to Sobral winds past dry riverbeds filled with cracked mud. As it goes further from Fortaleza, industrial warehouses for Amazon and Fedex give way to Carnaúba trees, with the occasional green Petrobras station and clusters of two-room houses with hammocks strung across their porches. On a recent day with 37 degree heat, curtains of smoke rose over rocky hills, as fires rolled through drought-parched bushes and left charred earth.

This is the rural Brazilian state, Ceará, in which an unlikely success occurred. In a small city of 200,000 people, four hours from the state capital, most children sat in dysfunctional classrooms where they were not learning - like so many places in the Global South. But in this city, politicians decided to reform their education system. And over 12 years, they did it. In 2005, Sobral ranked 1,366 among 5,570 municipalities in Brazil, and in 2017, it ranked first in the country for primary and lower secondary.

I went to Sobral last month as part of a trip organized by the new Lemann Center for Leadership & Equity in Education, with a group of leaders from schools in São Paulo state, funders, and Parceiros da Educação. We observed a preschool, primary school, and middle school, and met with leaders including Ivo Gomes, the current Mayor and former Secretary of Education for Sobral.

The question that we all want to know is: what did Sobral do right? From what I saw, we can summarize their toolbox in 10 key steps:

1. POLITICAL WILL: Most importantly, for reforms to start in the first place, politicians at the top needed to prioritize their time and budget to education - even alongside urgent issues such as healthcare, housing, and crime. Former Mayor Cid Gomes was the catalyst. He is a member of a powerful political dynasty (that includes Sobral’s first Mayor in the 1800’s). This was likely part of why he had the political capital to choose to focus on education.

2. CONTINUITY: But political will in intermittent jolts is not enough. In Sobral, a stable center-left coalition was able to keep the Mayor’s seat for over 25 years. (Cid Gomes was Mayor from 1997-2004, Leônidas Cristino 2005-2010, Veveu Arruda 2010-2017, and Ivo Gomes from 2017). As a result, Mayors could lead reforms and plan with a view longer than one short election cycle.

3. TEACHING COORDINATORS: Most Brazilian schools have a principal/headteacher (called a Director) who is in charge, with a Teaching Coordinator who supports learning. However, what makes Sobral different is that they utilized this Coordinator role particularly well. They ensured that the Director oversees operations, finance, and other administrative functions, while Teaching Coordinators strengthen everything inside the classroom. In the primary school we visited, four Teaching Coordinators circulated to help teachers prepare lesson plans, observe lessons, and coach teachers to improve. In my opinion, this investment in intensive teacher support (and high ratio of coaches to teachers) is the most important ingredient for Sobral’s results.

Four Teaching Coordinators (right) and their Director (left).

4. DEPOLITICIZE PRINCIPAL HIRING: In addition to changing the role of a principal, reformers also changed the hiring process. School leaders used to be selected based on political patronage, to reward loyal allies. After reforms, school leaders were instead selected based on technical expertise and skills to lead a school. This is a common challenge in many countries (such as South Africa, where I researched the negative impact of patronage-based principal appointments for my undergrad thesis). It is remarkable that Sobral’s leaders were able to implement this reform despite the resistance that comes when changing an entrenched political system.

5. WORKBOOKS & LESSON GUIDES: Across the city, every child uses the same series of workbooks developed by a central team of experts. The workbooks progress through increasingly harder skills, with exercises in a sequence designed based on evidence about effective ways to teach skills. Teachers also use a common lesson guide that outlines a sequence of topics and specific learning objectives for every subject. Teachers have the freedom to design their own lesson plans, but the student workbooks and lesson guides ensure that they are taking students through an evidence-based curriculum. (These reminded me of scripted lessons used by Tusome or New Globe, except Sobral’s teachers have more autonomy).

6. KNOWLEDGE FLOW ACROSS SYSTEM: Every Tuesday, all of Sobral’s school leaders meet with the city’s Secretary of Education. In this weekly four-hour session, they share successes, view data about all of their students, and share challenges they face so that other school leaders can offer practices/tools that they found to work. And in a teacher’s 40 hour workweek, they have 32 hours in class and 8 hours protected - to plan lessons, meet with other teachers to seek help, and receive training. These ensure that leaders and teachers across the system support each other rather than struggle in isolation.

7. START EARLY & PRIORITIZE HEALTH: In Brazil, all children are required to go to preschool from ages 4-6. Sobral also offers free preschool for ages 1-3. We know that the first three years of life are critical for brain growth for babies and toddlers. Sobral uses preschools to expose children to more words from an early age, which helps them get ready to read before they even enter primary. They also offer young children safe spaces that are a break from any potential trauma at home such as domestic violence - which has benefits because of the way that trauma worsens learning outcomes later on. Like all Brazilian schools, Sobral offers a free daily snack to every student. Sobral’s schools also have regular visits from a health professional who diagnoses issues such as students who need glasses.

Preschool students during recess.

8. FREQUENT ASSESSMENTS & INTENSIVE SUPPORT: Students do quizzes every two months. Teachers use this data to see who is grasping key skills and who is not. They place struggling students into special sessions where the students receive intensive support 1-1 or in a small group. This frequent data collection also helps the city’s Secretary of Education and Teaching Coordinators to have a clear sense of how all students are progressing.

Two parts totally surprised me:

9. MINIMAL EDTECH: We hear so much about the power of technology for learning at scale, but Sobral’s model is done almost entirely on paper! All students write their quizzes and exercises by hand, and teachers gather data this way to give it to the central office. This showed me that systems change does not have to involve fancy software, expensive tablets, or getting teachers to adopt unfamiliar tools.

10. CONFIDENCE & PRIDE: This is hard to explain, but from the school heads and Teaching Coordinators, up to the Secretary of Education - when any of Sobral’s leaders shared about their methods or reforms, they did so with a palpable sense of pride. You could tell that they have what experts call high self-efficacy: a belief that they can do it. I have been in so many schools where leaders speak about how hard their environment is. (And they do usually deserve better conditions and treatment from the Ministry managing them!). But what was different about Sobral was the spirit of positivity. Where they face challenges, they have the growth mindset to find a solution. Clearly the reform effort is doing something to develop this kind of self-efficacy in everyone involved. I believe this is key for Sobral’s results.

Teachers speaking to guests during a reading circle.

Many organizations are spreading Sobral’s methods to other education systems. Cid Gomes became Governor of Ceará and replicated the Sobral approach across the state. Associação Bem Comum trains leaders in other states to learn from Sobral and Ceará. And Lemann Center is training over 2,100 leaders in 56 towns and cities across Brazil - along with 52 education leaders in Kenya and Pakistan.

Sobral’s system is definitely not perfect. I walked into one classroom where a fight between students was in progress as a teacher stood across the room. The city’s outcomes on middle school and secondary are not as strong as their outcomes for primary. Like most schools in Brazil, Sobral’s schools still have a split system where half the students attend in the morning and the other half in the afternoon (Sobral is expanding to a full-day model). And critics say that the city’s relentless focus on literacy and numeracy in primary comes at the expense of children having more time to play at recess or pursue other subjects, such as history. 

But Sobral’s leaders want to continuously improve. And their reforms so far show that even in a difficult environment with similar resources and challenges to other places, leaders can dramatically reform their system within 15 years. For anyone who wants to improve a government education system, there is much we can learn from this city in rural Brazil. 

To dive deeper into Sobral’s methods and reforms, read the in-depth case studies by RISE (here and here) and the World Bank.

This article was originally published in Portuguese by the Lemann Center for Leadership & Equity in Education. This version reflects my personal views and not those of the Center.