, Columnist
Brazil’s Classrooms Need More Capitalism
Private investment can help fix education in Latin America.
More private investment, please.
Photographer: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images
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Oil, soybeans, iron ore — schooling. The list of goods for which Brazilian enterprise is known has just gotten longer. Last month, the region’s educational giant Kroton Educacional S.A. bought up a local rival, Somos, in a deal that could reach $1.8 billion.
The acquisition was a boon not just to the world’s largest for-profit education company, which has been on a buying spree, but also to a region where fiscal woes have gutted public investment in schools and student performance has been lackluster, at best.