Basic education is a crucial step in establishing an equity policy – 06/21/2023 – Cida Bento

Since 2020, we have nurtured the expectation that the country may be getting closer to entering a very promising phase of reducing socioeconomic and racial inequalities in basic education.

The Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and the Valuation of Education Professionals (Fundeb), amended in 2020, made the central mechanism for financing basic education permanent by increasing the Union’s participation in the cost of public enrollment and modifying the model of redistribution of resources.

This is an achievement of the black movement and of educational institutions that organized themselves so that the letter «R» of Vaar (Amount Student/Year per Result) was changed to “Race”, so that the resources were destined to networks that presented a reduction of racial and socioeconomic inequalities.

Budget supplementation, especially considering Fundeb conditionality 3, which demands an effective reduction of socioeconomic and racial inequalities in accessing resources, will bring significant advances to school attendance, improved performance and permanence in school, constituting a powerful public policy induction of racial equity, among other advances.

Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that for the first time, legal instruments formally recognize that socioeconomic and racial inequalities must be faced concretely, in order to achieve systemic quality in basic education.

In this year, 2023, 34% of the education networks fulfilled the conditionality of reducing socioeconomic and racial inequalities and became eligible to receive the resource. That is, this result explains that we can indeed implement this policy. Here and now!

An analysis of the distribution of Vaar complementation values ​​in 2023, carried out by Instituto Unibanco, shows that we are on the right path, as the result points to favoring municipalities with a lower Human Development Index (HDI) and a greater presence of black population.

We need to quickly expand this percentage of educational networks that manage to change socioeconomic and racial inequalities, but this result already signals to other Brazilian municipalities that the accumulation of knowledge and practices produced by different segments of organized civil society, government agencies, the black movement and of black women and organizations that work in the educational field are a fundamental collection available to support the work of administrators and educators throughout Brazil.

If we want to strengthen democracy and implement a development model that includes all Brazilians, equity is a fundamental value. And basic education is a crucial stage for establishing this equity policy.

Much remains to be done in improving policies and practices in the field of racial equity in basic education, but this improvement goes hand in hand with policy implementation.

It is necessary to invest in improving the collection and treatment of color/race data and in the improvement of indicators that bring more and more precision to the analysis of the racial dimension in the educational context of inequalities, so that public policies can be permanently improved

We need to improve the structural conditions of the education networks where vulnerable populations are located and the working conditions of teachers and administrators, and invest in the production of didactic materials and toys that contribute to a policy of equity in basic education.

And this improvement work must be done in a joint construction between specialists and public managers, in dialogue with organized civil society.

We will only be able to change our internal data and Brazil’s place in international education evaluation indices if we solve the problem of inequality, which affects more than half of the Brazilian population.

We need all Brazilian children, adolescents and young people to benefit from the constitutional right to quality education as effective learning.

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