In Latin America, almost all children go to school. The problem is what happens there. According to the OECD, advantaged students in Latin America score on average worse on PISA evaluations than disadvantaged students in wealthy countries: universal schooling has been constructed, but the quality necessary to promote social mobility remains insufficient in several countries in the region. School expansion without sufficient quality improvement can limit the reduction of inequality of origin and, in some contexts, contribute to its reproduction.
The Essential Points
- Universal school access is insufficient to redistribute opportunities if teaching quality remains below a critical threshold.
- 28% of 20-24 year-olds in Latin America lack a secondary diploma, and the results gap between income quintiles reaches 37 points according to the OECD (2025).
- The inequality of opportunity index in LAC is twice as high as in the OECD in 2022, revealing that family background determines educational trajectories more in the region than elsewhere.
- Targeted policies exist: teacher strengthening, conditional transfer programs, and individualized monitoring are beginning to produce measurable results in several countries.
- The decade 2025-2035 constitutes a window: countries that cross this quality threshold now will anchor mobility trajectories for two generations; those that do not will perpetuate structural inequality legitimized by credentials.
Access Without Quality: How Real Progress Can Mask Lasting Failure
Between 1990 and 2020, Latin America accomplished something impressive on paper. Primary school enrollment rates reached levels comparable to those of wealthy countries. Millions of children who, a generation earlier, would have left the system before learning to read properly were able to complete at least several years of secondary education. Governments built schools, trained teachers, expanded conditional cash transfer programs tied to school attendance.
Yet the OECD report released in 2025 on social mobility and inequalities in Latin America arrives with a diagnosis that should force us to reread this success differently. What has progressed is coverage. What has not progressed enough is what school actually transmits.
The comparison with OECD countries is striking precisely because it overturns the usual intuition. One generally assumes that advantaged students achieve good results everywhere, and that disadvantaged students are pulled down in poor countries. But PISA data show something more brutal: students who belong to the upper income quintiles in Latin America, those who have access to the best private schools, private tutoring, educated families, find themselves on average below the level of disadvantaged students in OECD countries. Economic advantage does not compensate, in the region, for globally insufficient system quality.
The problem in Latin America is therefore twofold: an average level that is insufficient and massive internal inequalities. The OECD reports an average gap of 68 points in mathematics between the upper and lower socioeconomic quartiles in LAC. Poor learning quality and educational inequalities contribute greatly to low mobility, among several institutional, territorial, and labor market determinants.
The Diploma Certifies Origin Rather Than Competence
Inequality of opportunity remains high in LAC. These inequalities are linked to circumstances of birth and conditions of access to educational resources. In Latin America, this proportion is significantly higher than elsewhere.
The concrete result of this mechanism is perverse. School, as an institution, derives its legitimacy from the promise that it evaluates individuals independently of their origin. It delivers certifications meant to signal competencies. Family origin strongly influences access to diplomas and educational resources; the quality and equity of certifications must therefore be evaluated empirically.
In LAC, approximately 35% of young people under 23 have not completed secondary education, according to the OECD. These young people are affected disproportionately by the lower end of the income distribution, but a breakdown by quintile must be provided to assert that the vast majority come from there. A very substantial portion of LAC adolescents do not acquire the basic competencies measured by PISA, and failure to complete secondary reduces employment prospects; these findings do not allow us to characterize uniformly all unqualified young people.
Weak competencies and lack of school completion increase the risk of informal and low-skilled employment, generally associated with weaker social protection and mobility prospects. Intergenerational mobility stops there. And the children of these young adults will restart the same cycle.
Policies That Have Shown the Threshold Can Be Crossed
Nothing in these data implies that the situation is fixed. Several countries in the region have experimented with policies that have produced measurable results, and their relative success makes it possible to understand what makes the difference.
Conditional cash transfer programs—Bolsa Família in Brazil, Oportunidades then Prospera in Mexico, Juntos in Peru—have demonstrated that conditioning social aid on school attendance keeps children in the system longer. Evaluations conducted by education economics researchers, several published in journals of the American Economic Association, show positive effects on school retention and, in the best-designed programs, modest but real learning gains. These policies have contributed to reducing early dropout in targeted families.
But retention alone is not enough. Costa Rica and Uruguay, which consistently achieve better results than their neighbors in the PISA rankings in the region, have in common that they have invested more in initial and ongoing teacher training, maintained national systems for assessing learning, and built educational institutions with relative stability over several decades. Chile, despite persistent inequalities, has undertaken substantial reform of teacher training and school evaluation since the mid-2010s.
These experiences underscore the importance of teacher quality among the factors explaining gaps between educational systems. In certain studies and contexts, differences in teacher quality have an estimated effect greater than a given reduction in class size; this does not allow for general hierarchization of all structural factors, particularly infrastructure.
PISA and PIAAC Data on Adult Competencies
PISA results measure 15-year-old students. The OECD’s PIAAC program, which evaluates adult competencies in literacy and numeracy, extends the analysis toward labor markets. PIAAC data show that weak competencies remain widespread among adults in participating LAC countries; they do not allow, by themselves, measurement of individual catch-up after entry into working life.
An adult whose literacy competencies are weak has access to a narrower range of jobs, negotiates his or her working conditions less well, and finds it more difficult to transition in case of economic shock. In a region where the labor market is already heavily segmented between formal and informal sectors, these competency deficits amplify inequalities of origin.
Barriers to mobility appear before, during, and after schooling, particularly in access to quality education and in the transition to formal employment.
The challenge of educational quality in Latin America is therefore not only a matter of social justice, though that is considerable. It is also a matter of macroeconomic productivity. Economists like Philippe Aghion have documented the link between quality human capital and an economy’s innovation capacity: countries that manage to raise the average level of competencies of their workforce gain the capacity to absorb and produce technologies, which translates into more sustainable growth. Latin America pays, in its long-term growth rates, part of the cost of this learning deficit.
The 2025-2040 Window: The Conditions Under Which Mobility Can Begin
The horizon of the next fifteen years constitutes a particular window for countries in the region, for a simple demographic reason: a substantial portion of children who will be on the labor market in 2040 are already in school today, or will be within the next five years. Policy choices made now, on teacher training, curricula, and assessment systems, will translate into the competencies of the adult workforce in 2040. The reverse is also true: failing to act now anchors current deficits for an additional generation.
Two trajectories are emerging, though current data do not allow us to prefer one with certainty.
In the first, several countries in the region cross the critical quality threshold over the next ten years. This requires sustained investments in teacher training and revaluation, robust systems for assessing learning independent of electoral cycles, and the ability to target schools and populations that accumulate the most delay. Positive signals exist: Brazil has launched structured literacy programs that are beginning to show effects in several states; private foundations like Fundación Enseña Chile or partnerships with organizations like Teach For All seek to attract talent toward teaching in underserved areas. If these programs scale up and are rigorously evaluated, they could help raise quality in system segments that have remained outside reforms.
In the second trajectory, fiscal and political constraints maintain the status quo. Education budgets remain concentrated on personnel spending in rigid systems, without resources reaching pedagogical quality. National assessments of learning, when they exist, remain communication exercises rather than management tools. In this scenario, expansion of school coverage continues without sufficient improvement in educational quality, and inequality of opportunity remains high.
What would make it possible to distinguish these trajectories in the years to come depends on a few observable signals: the evolution of PISA scores in disadvantaged subgroups (reducing an internal gap constitutes progress only if it is accompanied by an improvement, or at minimum a satisfactory maintenance, of learning outcomes for the most disadvantaged students), the training of young teachers in programs whose quality is evaluated, and the continuity of educational policies beyond a single term. This last point is perhaps the most difficult: educational reforms that produce results often unfold over time, which can exceed the duration of political terms in the region.
The open question is that of the threshold. OECD data show that the quality of education, competencies, and family origin are linked to mobility, without establishing a unique threshold.
Precisely identifying this threshold for each national context and designing policies to cross it constitute one of the principal research and public policy challenges that Latin America faces over the next ten years.
Sources
- OECD (2025), Social Mobility and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean: Insights from Education and Skills
- ECLAC, Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean 2025 (CEPAL, Santiago)
- OECD, Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), LAC data
- OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume I: The State of Learning and Equity in Education (OECD Publishing, Paris)