Dr Claudia Costin is Founder and Director of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies at Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation, a higher education institution and think tank, and has held key roles such as Senior Director for Global Education at the World Bank and Secretary of Education for Rio de Janeiro. She has also served on global boards such as UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning and was a visiting professor at Harvard.
In 2024 Dr. Costin joined Nord Anglia's Education Advisory Board, which provides external perspectives to support the international schools group’s educational offering across its 80+ schools. Chaired by Lord David Puttnam, its areas of focus include professional development, safeguarding, and the progress of teaching and learning.
I'm a daughter of two refugees. My mother was a war refugee. She left her country Hungary in 1944 in a very difficult situation. She is, in a sense, a survivor. She didn't go to concentration camps, but she suffered many of the things that happened in 1944 in Hungary. So, she fled with her family. My father left Romania in 1949 after the war, fleeing Stalinism, and they met in Brazil.
My mother wasn't able to finish her lower secondary education, so she was always saying to us kids: ‘Don't forget that the only thing that dictators or autocracy cannot take from you is what you have in your head.’ So, education was very important to her, having not been able to pursue her own. She became one of the first IT specialists in Brazil without formal education.
So, I was very inspired by her, and I wanted to become a teacher. But I couldn't because my father was a businessman, and my older brother died when he was 18. My father was preparing my older brother to become his successor, so he asked me to study business. I wanted to go into education, but I didn't want to hurt a father who had just lost a son, so I asked for three days to think about it and discovered that one business school in Brazil, the most prestigious one, also had a course on public administration or public policy. So, I went there and took the more challenging public administration exam and passed the test. Since it was paid by the government, there was no tuition. My father discovered this, when he said, ‘Wait, I never paid the tuition’ I said, that’s because it's free.
For some work I did with for the World Economic Forum, I researched what good schools and good school systems were doing to prepare the next generation for the future of work, and I discovered that many of them were working on collaborative problem-solving, complex problem-solving and creativity, developing in kids critical thinking and systemic thinking. In other words, they were teaching them how to think, not only to know facts and dates by heart. What is also important is developing the social and emotional skills they will need for their future work, skills such as having empathy, cultural agility, and being able to navigate different cultures.
I think education for democracy will become something very important. A good way to teach students is to teach them to discuss issues from opposing viewpoints without being aggressive to each other. It’s about learning how to respect other points of view while at the same time trying to not create biases in our opinions, with views not only based on social media. It seems obvious, but it’s not.
I'm an optimistic person, with my feet on the ground, and I think there’s an urgent need to educate students with the skills needed for the future of work and, at the same time, for the future of a cohesive society.
I’m very happy that you brought up this point. With privilege should come a sense of social responsibility, because our young people are eventually going to lead companies, countries or social movements. So, they have to give back, not only by donating to charity, which is important, but giving back in the sense of making society more cohesive. They’ll need to look at social inequalities and think this should be changed. A sense of purpose is very important. Nord Anglia can do this through their professional development programmes, helping prepare teachers and principals, who are the leaders of the learning process, to advance this in each one of the schools. It’s not only important to promote academic excellence, which I believe is very important, but also a sense of citizenship.
In Rio, at the time, if you looked at the average, girls were studying more years than boys. But there were 155 schools in Rio that were in the middle of the favelas controlled by drug dealers. Girls left school because they got pregnant; or offered themselves to drug dealers to buy “protection.” This was very sad. I took these 155 schools—out of 10,084 schools, plus 200 nurseries or three preschools—and we created a project called Schools of Tomorrow.
This was a kind of affirmative action, giving more to the schools that needed more, putting the best principals and teachers in those schools, and giving the biggest boost to salaries to those teachers. If I didn't have the money to give every school a science lab, those 155 schools still got science labs. And if I didn't have money to have after school programs in every school, we still had after school programs at all those schools.
We worked with the neighborhood associations in each of the slums to build community support for transforming these schools and in two years, the learning outcomes were raised 33% in lower secondary. This is something I'm very proud of. In the end, all the schools improved, including the ones that were not in the slums. And where we could, we had private schools help with the professional development for teachers in the schools that were more challenged.
It’s so important for everybody to have a good public school system.
You have to build equity, not by lowering the bar, but having big expectations for everyone and giving additional support to those who need it. It was very common in Brazil and in Rio to deal with poor kids by saying, ‘Oh, they’re poor. Don't challenge them too much; they should be cared for, but not really educated.’ That’s terrible! When I talk to teachers, I would say, ‘It’s like if I told you about someone joining a football team and you say he didn't eat well as a child and comes from a poor neighborhood, so he doesn't need to train so much.’ No, it's the opposite. You have to give additional support.
Building equity is very challenging because you need to develop an even better education for kids from vulnerable areas. It starts with what Carol Dweck calls a ‘growth mindset’. You can expect big growth in developing skills, in becoming a better citizen, in everything else, right? That sounds naive, but it's not. It's the way to build a cohesive society.
What I'm proud of is that I didn't give up. I'm an old lady, I’m 69. And in difficult situations, I continued, I have continued to believe, not only in education, but that it’s possible to build a better society. I'm happy that with my team, we changed the landscape of education, even though we have so much more work to do. Even though there is still a lot of work to do, I console myself thinking, ‘Well, the next generation has to continue this work’. The Great Wall of China was built over generations. So there is a role for each generation to continue building a world that I hope will be better than ours.
I have to confess, I was proud of the invitation, and I thought ‘I will learn a lot of things and will teach public schools how to offer an incredible education’. So, it's egotistic in the sense that I want to give back to my country or to schools in Africa. I lived in Angola for one year and I'm very connected to the country, so I said to myself: ‘I'm going to discover everything they do to help kids succeed, and at the same time, give back to others—to public school systems around the world.’
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