Improving Education, where to start?

I believe there is consensus in Brazil today that to ensure sustainable economic growth in the country there are two areas that need to undergo striking transformations - in infrastructure, particularly logistics (ports, airports and roads, including railroads) and in education. As my knowledge of the area of infrastructure is limited to being a user, suffering in the airports and on the roads, I intend to continue this post talking about education.

From what I've been following in the debate about improving the quality of the Brazilian educational outcome (yes, we should focus our thoughts on goals and results rather than on processes that actually serve to get results and should not be considered as ends in of themselves), I realize that the debate revolves around investing in teachers (with better pay and training for teaching with higher quality) and little more than that. I agree that both are essential to promote positive change, as long as we understand that the meaning of the wage increase is that it will bring about a corresponding increase in the status of the teacher thus signaling that society as a whole sees the education of their children as a priority and also to be the path for upward social and economic mobility.

However, I believe there are much more profound questions to be addressed and that will require very significant investment, but nothing that other developing countries (and some poorer than Brazil) have already made. I'm talking about the physical structures used for education: schools, and understand their global role in the communities where they are built. In many localities the public school is a major public building, or even the only one, and therefore when designing each school, the ideal would be to design it not only looking at the topography and the projected number of students it is to serve, but to consult the local community and their needs so that a public building (or complex) may be built to serve the many needs of the community with a much lower investment than if we look at each service need and build specific structures for each one. Today, in my experience from seeing public schools in the region of Greater Sao Paulo, it seems that the only requirement made of the architects is to create schools that have an "x" number of classrooms to receive three shifts of students, a patio, one football court, na Office for those attending the public, a director’s office and a staff room that perhaps is big enough for one quarter of teachers who actually teach in the school. When designing factories, one takes into account the type of production that will be done so as to maximize production and also consider the care of employees so they can produce better - if the product of the school is the level of educational outcome, it would make sense that, as in factories and hospitals, they must have an architecture that will promote such an outcome. This also means that we build schools according to students' age and type of education proposed - I think that we have to design schools: for the first cycle of primary school with children aged six to ten years old where we have a dedicated teacher per class with specialists in physical education and arts/music (which also need adequate rooms for the teaching proposed); for the second cycle of basic education with students from eleven to fourteen years where teachers of subjects should have their rooms for history, geography, mathematics, etc.  and finally for high school students between fifteen and eighteen years of age with science, languages and computing labs. In smaller towns and localities, I see no problem in having a structure for students from the second cycle of basic education at the end of high school.