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Daniel Lopes de Castro

About

Teacher and education researcher. I work at the boundary between assessment, data and accelerating learning in the age of AI.

I built my career around a question Brazil still hasn’t answered well: how do you turn educational data into better decisions?

It began with a simple wish — to affect education the way education affected me — and with a question I have been asking since I was young: what works? To get anywhere near the answer, which I am still chasing every day, I had to immerse myself in research and experience the classroom first-hand.

Data, programming, experiments, assessments and chalk have always been the tools of the trade. I study public policy evaluation, educational inequality, and the use of large-scale information to improve educational outcomes. My path has run between research centres, schools and education departments, doing studies, consultancy, technology development and public policy.

I had the honour of helping to build the newest arm of Brazil’s Ministry of Education: the Secretariat for Information Management, Innovation and Evaluation of Educational Policy (SEGAPE), where I led the Directorate of Data Governance and Integration and contributed to the country’s education data ecosystem — EducaDados, the national education data infrastructure.

Along the way, one thing became very clear. Producing good evidence is not enough. The evidence has to reach the people deciding, in a form that supports a decision, within the window in which the decision gets made. There is no easy route.

Today I write, research, and work with school systems, organisations and governments that need to take data more seriously — and that are deciding, right now, what to do about artificial intelligence.

I write in Portuguese and English about education , data governance and artificial intelligence — three distinct subjects that, on the desk of whoever is deciding, almost always arrive together.

Education #

  • MA in Education (Educational Policy and Institutions) — Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
  • Data Governance — Insper (Executive Programme)
  • Postgraduate Specialisation in Pedagogical and School Coordination — FOCUS
  • BA in Pedagogy — Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

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