In Brazil, school pays.

• Position: Education - Brief Article

Many poor Brazilian families send their children to work. So the government has been giving small cash payments to the poor (about $24 a month) in exchange for keeping their children in school and taking them for medical checkups. By 2006, the Family Grant program is expected to reach more than 45 million people, about a quarter of Brazil's population. That would be by far the world's largest such effort. "I think these programs are as close as you can come to a magic bullet in development," says Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. The spread of this approach across Latin America has been fueled by impressive results from a raft of studies--in...