Denis Mizne: Brazil can make children literate by 2030 – 12/10/2023 – Education

Imagine a Brazilian child sitting in a class in China. She looks at the blackboard, at the books, and sees ideograms that she is unable to understand.

It is with this metaphor that Denis Mizne, 47, executive director of the Lemann Foundation, one of Brazil’s main non-governmental organizations in the area of ​​education, talks about the serious situation in Brazilian schools in the post-pandemic and post-Bolsonaro period, with 70% of students who are not literate until the end of the 2nd year, a time considered ideal for learning to develop well.

Faced with lessons after lessons they don’t understand, “imagine the frustration of these kids,” says Mizne. These students continue at school, in fits and starts, and most end up abandoning education in the 8th, 9th year of elementary school and especially in the 1st year of high school.

In this interview with Sheet, Mizne talks about a program to boost literacy that the Lemann Foundation supports in 17 states and the commitment that the organization has made to eradicate school illiteracy by the end of this decade. “It’s viable,” she says.

He also evaluates the first year of the administration, in education, of President Lula (“There is always room for improvement, but it is incomparable with Bolsonaro”) and the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas (“Still troubled, with a lot of energy but little dialogue”).

A year after the elections, as you. evaluate the impact of the change from the Bolsonaro government to the Lula administration on education?
We will always find areas to improve, but it is incomparable. We once again have a MEC. With Bolsonaro, there was a view that the MEC should not have a role. And precisely during the pandemic. It was a moment of enormous fragility, especially for the most vulnerable students. With Lula, we have a MEC that prioritizes basic education, with a commitment to literacy, the connected schools program, the expansion of full-time education, the recovery of learning and the re-discussion of secondary education. It is a technical government in education, which managed to set an agenda with priorities that make sense, dialogues with states, municipalities and education sectors. There are challenges, controversies, of course, education is not an easy area.

The literacy program, touted by Lula, has not yet had a penny invested, as Folha showed. Considering that literacy is a pillar of the Lemann Foundation, how do you evaluate this issue?
The fact that the government has launched the program is great news, because the MEC is needed in this area, with investment, guidance and assessment of literacy. But you need to spend the money, get the machine running. Politics without a budget is speech. I understand that this government found the MEC unstructured, there was time for reconstruction, but the budget needs to be executed. I am confident that this will happen by the end of the year.

Like mr. Do you see the literacy scenario in the country today?
Brazilian public schools still produce a large number of illiterate children, especially the poorest, black ones and those from the North and part of the Northeast. Before the pandemic, half of the children were literate at the end of the 2nd year, which is the ideal age, according to the BNCC [Base Nacional Comum Curricular, que define as diretrizes da educação no país].

With the pandemic, this number fell to 30%. That’s why literacy has to be a priority. There is no way to think about other content if the child does not know how to read and write, interpret a text and express themselves through writing.

Despite this illiteracy rate, practically all children continue in school. They will start to drop out of school around the 8th, 9th year and especially in the 1st year of high school. And, for an illiterate child, it’s as if the class were in China. She looks at the blackboard, at the books, and sees an ideogram that she is unable to understand. Imagine the frustration. Literacy for these children is a big leap for the country and it is not rocket science, it happens every day in classrooms. When it doesn’t happen, it’s because we are making a serious mistake.

How do you work, in practice, to improve literacy in these states?
The Alliance for Literacy, formed by the Lemann Foundation, the Natura Institute and Co-Impact, and supported by a group of other organizations, is committed to contributing a total of R$250 million within five years with a focus on eradicating children’s illiteracy in Brazil. This agreement began in 2022. We committed to eradicating school illiteracy by the end of this decade. It’s viable.

We are taking a program based on the Ceará experience to 17 states, in which governments place literacy as a priority. Associação Bem Comum, an organization of professionals from Ceará who have experience in this process, provides technical expertise. We support teacher training and the production of teaching materials and fluency assessment. Gradually, states are taking on this process alone. Those in the program returned to pre-pandemic levels within a year. This year, we will see if they really are on an upward trajectory. I’m optimistic. With the MEC’s ​​commitment, it will go even faster.

What are the levers that make literacy happen?
There are six of them: teacher training, teaching materials, construction of a system for evaluating student fluency, prizes for schools with the best performances (And the school only receives part of the prize when it helps another to progress), tax incentives ( Part of the ICMS is allocated to municipalities with literacy efforts) and governance (cooperation regime between states, municipalities, and other partners).

In São Paulo, after almost three decades of PSDB, like Mr. evaluate new directions in education?
It is still a troubled administration. It started with a lot of energy and little dialogue, and this ended up generating a lot of back and forth, like what happened with the teaching material [o governo Tarcísio decidiu acabar com livros didáticos impressos e, com a reação negativa, teve que recuar]. This is bad for education. It is necessary to do things with more study and dialogue with teachers and society.

What is positive is the outlook that this management has for recovery. [Alguns criticam:] “Ah, but you’re going to prioritize math!” Maybe it’s really necessary now. We really need to extend class time and offer technological resources to teachers. What is not positive is thinking that technology will solve everything, because it won’t. We also saw in the pandemic that there are problems with infrastructure. First, the government should guarantee access to quality internet and equipment in schools. Only then should teaching platforms be introduced in a complementary way, without putting an end to printed books.

What can be done to shield education from political heat, so that it is treated as a matter of the State and not of each government?
Education should be more shielded from outbursts. Some mechanisms created in the country help to mitigate this, such as the National Assessment System, the National Common Curricular Base, Fundeb [Fundo Nacional para o Desenvolvimento da Educação, que define o repasse de recursos para a educação]. The National Education System is now under discussion in Congress [organiza as responsabilidades das esferas nacional, estadual e municipal na educação e as formas de cooperação entre elas].

Every time we try to do things by decree, in a rushed manner, it doesn’t work. The high school [aprovado por um decreto no governo Temer] it is an example. You have to resist the outburst, the punch.

Considering the impacts of the pandemic and the MEC blackout under Bolsonaro, in addition to the abrupt changes in education at the federal and state levels, what role does civil society play?
During the pandemic, without the action of the MEC, there was a movement of civil society organizations to respond to this gap, guarantee support for students, and this was very well regarded by society. At the same time, a view of distrust on the far right grew, with attacks on the actions of civil society. With Lula, we returned to working with a government that was much more open to civil society.

But there are still some fields that criminalize technical input and the influence of civil society on educational policies. These are conspiratorial views, such as “Foundations want to privatize public education.” Isn’t it clear that our commitment is to public education?

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Denis Mizne, 47

Executive director of the Lemann Foundation since 2011, he is a lawyer graduated from USP, with experience at Columbia, Yale and Harvard universities, in the USA. He is a Fellow of Practice at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. He was special advisor and chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice (1999-2000). He founded and chairs the board of the Instituto Sou da Paz. He is a member of the Federal Government’s Economic and Social Development Council and the Yale University Council on International Relations.