Brazilian education policymakers convene at Stanford to connect research and policy

Applying academic research to the real world can be a complex and frustrating endeavor.

“Just putting better data out there is often not enough to really initiate policy change,” said Guilherme Lichand, assistant professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His research involves gathering high-quality data on the Brazilian educational system.

Lichand received a Stanford Impact Labs design fellowship sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) to advance the real-world applications of his research. He is engaging with Brazilian educators and legislators to connect his data to educational policy, and he recently brought a group of Brazilian federal legislators to Stanford for a workshop.

The convening advanced IAJS’s goal of promoting ideas that will result in thriving communities, said Tomás R. Jiménez, IAJS founding faculty co-director and the Joan B. Ford Professor and professor in sociology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences.

“It’s important to think about both the strengths associated with diversity and the challenges that diversity presents — and how we can address those collectively so that everybody in the community can flourish,” Jiménez said.

Worldwide impact

It also represents a broadening of discussions that are often U.S. focused.

“When you think of race and ethnicity, you often think in a U.S.-centric way, but these differences affect communities around the world,” Jiménez said.

Lichand runs an initiative in Brazil that collects data on K-12 schools through regular interviews with students, teachers, and principals at a representative sample of Brazil’s schools. Interviewers use tablets that also allow them to go beyond simple questions to administer proficiency tests or test the Wi-Fi speed at a school.

“The idea is to provide legislators with on-demand data that they could then use to write new legislation, to block bad legislation, or to put pressure on the ministry of education to do better even without new legislation,” Lichand said.

The workshop at Stanford facilitated an exchange of ideas about the legislators’ priorities and about how Lichand might be able to collect data to help them. 

Expert presentations

Participants also heard presentations from David Plank, professor emeritus and co-director of the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazilian Education; and Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus and president of the California State Board of Education.

Plank led a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges the Brazilian educational system faces. For example, many Brazilian teachers work at more than one school, making it difficult for school communities to form.

“The quality of teachers is important, but even more important is the school community where the teacher works,” Plank said. “Many Brazilian teachers are seen as people who supply services – they’re not members of an educational community.”

Darling-Hammond took the workshop participants through the history of California’s K-12 education system from its place as one of the nation’s best in the early 1970s, through three decades of devastating budget cuts, to a turnaround in the past 15 years.

New approaches

The new system has fewer mandates and instead measures how schools do on eight state priorities, including student achievement, school climate, curriculum access, and student engagement. 

“How do you get kids to be able to learn independently?” Darling-Hammond said. “Learning ability is the thing that we really have to get schools to develop. That’s different than memorizing things.”

The workshop helped participants more closely connect research and policy.

“We mapped out several opportunities for joint work,” Lichand said. “I can see how bringing the participants to Stanford will make a concrete difference in the extent to which our data will actually make its way into educational policies in Brazil.”