Less than half the children who enroll in Brazil's basic education system complete their first eight years of study due, largely, to the poor quality of public schooling. The recent production of reliable school performance information, and the creation of new forms of democratic school management, should facilitate the debate of education reform and the implementation of quality improvements. Meanwhile, the continuing lack of basic educational proficiencies frustrates individual and collective aspirations for the expansion of democratic citizenship and for greater social, ethnic and gender equality.

The Education Program emphasizes the reform of basic education as a stepping stone to greater social equality. The Program addresses the obstacles to reform through support for policy-related research that can strengthen

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the school system's ability to retain students and upgrade the overall quality of the teaching-learning environment. The Program facilitates the development of diagnostic evaluation methods that can identify systemic weaknesses and promote appropriate solutions. The Program also supports projects that seek a policy framework conducive to democratic school-level governance, and that cater to the specific educational disadvantages of African-Brazilian children.

Education Program actions involve:

• Applied research and design of educational assessment tools to evaluate curricula, student learning abilities and progress; the design of management information systems; research on African-Brazilian educational disadvantage; policy studies to formulate a democratic school-reform agenda;

• Capacity building through research competitions and graduate-level university programs in the fields of educational assessment, school administration and African-Brazilian education; support for school reform advocacy organizations; support for national associations of researchers and public education officials; and,

• Public debate among policymakers, school administrators, teachers and families; training for democratic school governance; training for the advancement of a culture of objective evaluation within the school system.