What We Can Learn About Latin American Educational Systems from International Tests: A Brief Foray / ‪Qué podemos aprender sobre los sistemas educativos latinoamericanos a partir de las pruebas internacionales. Una breve incursión‬

‪The article points out that more than 50 years ago there were already concerns about educational quality, but there were almost no databases to compare national systems and the analytical tools available were not very powerful. Analyzes the scores obtained in the PISA 20002018 tests by students from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, adjusting them to discount the influence of family resources, the average social class of the school and the grade in which they are enrolled. The adjusted results are different from raw scores, to the extent that students from Mexico, Uruguay, and perhaps Brazil perform better than those from Chile. In some countries, especially Peru and Uruguay, there were significant improvements, but much of it was due to an increase in social class and the average school grade reached by young people, rather than to improvements in learning. Other analyzes compare the results of the federal states of Mexico, showing that there were important differences, since in some the students achieved significant gains, but in a few the scores dropped. Differences in the relationship between the state authority and the union are pointed out as a possible explanation.