Lula to advance Fundeb to extend full time – 05/02/2023 – Education

Part of the federal strategy to increase full-time enrollment in Brazil will be to advance funds from Fundeb (the main financing mechanism for basic education) to states and municipalities that increase this type of vacancies.

The MEC (Ministry of Education) will also have a line of financing to encourage this expansion and negotiates with the economic area of ​​the government the values.

The idea within the Ministry of Education is to have R$ 2 billion this year and another R$ 2 billion next year to expand full-time vacancies in states and municipalities, which concentrate enrollments. That depends, according to government officials interviewed by the Sheetof internal negotiations —this policy should be announced in the coming days by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

The Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, said this Tuesday (2) at the Senate Education Commission that the government wants to reach the goal of the PNE (National Education Plan), which provides for 25% of enrollments in extended time at school ( at least 7 hours). In the last PNE follow-up report, the country reached 15%, considering all stages of basic education (from kindergarten to high school).

To reach the goal, it is necessary to include about 3 million students in this modality, according to MEC. Studies show that there are good results in expanding the students’ workload, but this means more expenses that go with food, teachers and infrastructure.

The PNE targets expire in 2024, and the fulfillment of most of them, such as full-time teaching, is behind schedule.

Fundeb rules —a basket of taxes targeted at education networks based on the number and type of enrollments— predict that the money will arrive in the year following the student’s registration at school, from when the School Census comes out. The idea, according to Santana and his team, is to anticipate part of the values ​​based on the expansion planning of each school network.

“We are proposing to anticipate Fundeb’s resource in that first year that it announces its intention [de ampliar as vagas]who will build the strategy are states and municipalities”, said the minister.

Fundeb predicts a higher student value for full-time students. The idea is that half of the resources provided for the new vacancies will be advanced as soon as the governments sign the commitment of new vacancies —which should happen later this year. The remainder will be transferred as soon as enrollment is completed, probably next year.

Literacy Pact foresees recovery actions up to the 5th grade

The expansion of full-time education is one of the flags of the Lula government. Another is the announcement of a new literacy policy, a topic also addressed at the meeting of the Senate Education Committee with the Minister of Education.

The new literacy pact that the MEC will launch in the next few days will also provide for recovery actions up to the 5th grade. The concern is to combat the effects of the pandemic among younger students, the most affected, said the minister.

“All specialists say that the most important phase for children are the initial years, when they learn easily. We need to guarantee literacy at the right age”, stated Santana.

The plan will have a federative agreement in which the states will have greater responsibilities with the municipalities in this planning, since the municipal networks concentrated the students of the initial years. The model is inspired by Ceará, a state with good results in this area and which was once governed by Camilo Santana.

There will also be a forecast of federal resources to induce the new program. “There will be induction, increased workload, teaching material, a series of actions so that we can recover these children who were harmed during the pandemic”, he said.

MEC has carried out a survey with 400 specialists and educators to define what is considered a literate child. The pact will consider the 2nd year of elementary school as the right age for literacy, but the new strategy should also include actions for students up to the 5th year due to the effects of the pandemic, a period in which students stayed more than a year with schools closed.

The performance of Brazilian students in the literacy cycle plummeted with the closure of schools, showed data from the federal evaluation of basic education for 2021, released last year.

The Saeb (Basic Education Assessment System) tests were applied to a sample of students in the 2nd year of elementary school. The drop in Portuguese was quite sharp, even at odds with the damage identified in the other stages of basic education.

There was a loss of 24.5 points in the average proficiency of these students between 2019 and 2021. The average grade went from 750 to 725.5, which experts consider a very strong drop.

In Mathematics, the drop in the average score of students in the 2nd year of elementary school was smaller, nine points. It went from 750 to 741.

The minister reiterated once again that the Lula government is going to launch a program to unblock education works that are at a standstill. In response to opposition senators, he reaffirmed that the continuity of the civic-military school program, launched by the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government, will not be a strategy of the current government — so far, the MEC ended up with an undersecretary that dealt with the subject, but the ordinance that created the project is still valid.