Argentina invests in education more than Canada and Australia

International comparisons are an effective tool for analyzing and improving public policy. So the government’s proposal to compare Argentina with developed countries with similar endowments is very positive. Instead of questioning this practice, it would be favorable to enrich the debate providing seriousness and professionalism to the comparison and extending it to other important issues such as educational indicators.

The government’s comparison of Argentina with Australia and Canada has generated considerable controversy. One of the most disputed claims was that the Argentinean public debt is lower than Canada’s and Australia’s. In order to reach this conclusion, officials did not count the debt owed by the National Treasury to other public bodies, basically ANSES and the Central Bank. This is a visible methodological error.

ANSES, in order to lend money to the National Treasury, borrows from active workers (who make contributions for future retirement) and present retirees (who are not properly paid due to lack of inflation adjustment in their pensions). Likewise, the Central Bank borrows money from the people when it issues unbaked money that loss value with subsequent inflation.

In any case, the practice of making comparisons with other countries, especially with those of higher development level, is a very healthy one. It’s not only good to deepen and improve these debates, but it’s important to extend it to even more important issues, such as education. In this sense, taking into account OECD data (the same source for public debt information) it can be seen that between 2000 and 2009:

·  In Australia, expenditure on education increased from 4.9% to 5.1% of GDP and the percentage of 15 year olds with insufficient reading abilities increased from 12% to 14%.

·  In Canada, expenditure on education decreased from 5.6% to 5.0% of GDP and the percentage of 15 year olds with insufficient reading abilities remained at 10%.

·  In Argentina, expenditure on education increased from 4.6% to more than 6.0% of GDP and the percentage of 15 year olds with insufficient reading abilities increased from 44% to 52%.

This data shows that Argentina invests more in education than Australia and Canada.  But Canada without increasing the financial effort (in fact, in terms of GDP it decreased) managed to keep a low proportion of students with inadequate reading skills. This is not a coincidence; it’s explained by systematic improvements in educational management. This is the opposite process of Argentina, who invested heavily in public education and also got much worse results.

Several factors explain Argentina’s failure, although the Educational Finance Law passed in 2005 had a leading role. There’s no need for sophisticated analysis to verify that international experience shows how more investment does not guarantee better education.  If lawmakers in Argentina, instead of sanctioning this law, would have appealed to the good practice of making comparisons with other countries, they had not made the mistake to base the educational policy – exclusively and entirely- in expenditure increases. 

This law established an educational expenditure increase to over 6% of GDP, without setting guidelines to induce a correct allocation of those resources. Most of the increase in the educational budget was destined to improve teacher salaries, to the point that in the last decade real wages (i.e. after inflation adjustment) doubled. But because the increase was granted indiscriminately to all teachers, this resulted on being not enough for the committed educator and a huge waste when assigned to employees who evade their responsibilities and, in many cases, don’t even attend schools. Likewise, it is highly negative that no part of the budget was allocated to improve and intensify educational evaluations. Like indiscriminate wage increases, the resistance to measure quality is a source for promoting mediocrity.

The dynamics of technological change imposes a labor market that increasingly demands more and more skilled workers and excludes unprepared workers. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there is no hope for a better future for the country if more than half of teenagers are not developing the minimal literacy skills. In this sense, international comparisons help understand the enormous social cost of carrying on condescending bad practices emerging from the conservative and reactionary attitudes that prevail in the Argentine educational system.