EDUCATION: Cuba’s Academic Advantage

Professor Martin Carnoy describes his research into the Cuban educational success story.

When the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gave math and language tests in 1997 to third and fourth graders in 13 Latin American countries, researchers were only mildly surprised to find that pupils in Cuba’s lowest-income schools outperformed most upper-middle-class students in the rest of the region. These test data confirmed years of anecdotal evidence that Cuba’s primary schools are by far the best in the region and may be better than schools in neighboring Florida.