TY  - GEN
AU  - Contreras, Dante
AU  - De Hoyos Navarro, Rafael Eduardo
AU  - Arias Ortiz, Elena
AU  - Marquez Ragonesi, Fernanda
AU  - Goldin, Andrea Paula
AU  - Näslund-Hadley, Emma
AU  - Dueñas, Ximena
AU  - Zoido, Pablo
AU  - Godoy Mateus, Silvana
TI  - Built to Last:  Advancing Education, Equity and Economic Development through Literacy and Numeracy
PY  - 2026
Y1  - 2026/09/09
DO  - 10.18235/0014497
AB  - Latin America and the Caribbean remains the world's most unequal region, and its productivity has stagnated for decades. Both challenges share a common root: the failure to build sufficient, high-quality human capital. This volume assembles the evidence on why foundational skills matter and what actually works to build them. It documents the economic case for investing in learning, showing that cognitive skills rather than years of schooling drive long-run growth, that private returns to education in the region exceed those of financial markets, and that well-designed investments in foundational learning largely pay for themselves through higher productivity and an expanded tax base. It then traces the scale of the region's learning deficit across the life cycle, drawing on ERCE, PISA, and PIAAC data to show that low proficiency emerges in the early primary grades, widens through secondary school, and persists into adulthood, with the steepest gaps falling on low-income, rural, and Indigenous students. Turning to causes and remedies, the book examines the neurocognitive foundations of reading and mathematical reasoning, then synthesizes nearly 280 impact evaluations of mathematics, literacy, and tutoring and remedial education programs to identify which instructional approaches, delivery modes, and program designs produce the largest learning gains. Across syntheses, structured lessons, explicit pedagogy, code-based reading instruction, and well-targeted tutoring emerge as consistently effective, while combined or "balanced" approaches tend to dilute the impact of their components. A final chapter turns from design to delivery, drawing on interviews with implementers across six countries to map the recurring barriers that erode program effectiveness at scale, few of which lie in program design itself. Rather than leaving policymakers to piece together scattered individual studies, the volume consolidates the global evidence on what works in building foundational skills. Its conclusion is that closing the region's learning gap is at once the most compelling moral obligation and the most profitable investment available to its governments.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.18235/0014497
ER  -