Measuring literacy listening to panel guesses is MEC populism, says educator

The method used by the current management of the Ministry of Education (MEC) to define what a literate student is is populist and goes beyond scientific criteria, according to João Batista Oliveira, president of the Alfa e Beto Institute and PhD in Education from Florida state university People’s Gazette.

At the end of May, MEC announced the results of the Alfabetiza Brasil survey. Based on the opinion of a panel of 251 teachers, the parameters were defined to say what a literate 7-year-old child would be.

According to the MEC, a literate student is one who reaches 743 points in Portuguese on the proficiency scale of the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb). Upon reaching this average, according to the portfolio, students “read small texts, made up of short periods and locate information on the textual surface”, produce “basic inferences based on the articulation between verbal and non-verbal text, as in comic strips and stories in comics” and “they also write, with spelling deviations, texts that circulate in everyday life for the purpose of simple communication: inviting, remembering something, for example”.

João Batista Oliveira says that the concept of literacy that will be used by the current MEC “is not literacy”. “It mixes apples with apples, it mixes reading with understanding… The only interesting thing that the Bolsonaro government has done in this area was a formal document, based on scientific evidence, scientific literature and written by competent people, defining very well what literacy is. new government ignores this, turns to a kind of ‘general assembly’ and asks: ‘General assembly, people of Brazil, what do you think literacy is?’ It’s a step backwards and it’s a mistake,” he comments. “It’s a general meeting, who shouts the most, the NGO that pays the most…”, he jokes.

For him, “the one who defines these things is not the ‘general assembly'”. “Whoever has the authority to define these things is a specialist. A specialist is the guy who knows the literature. They consulted people who are not teaching literacy and who don’t know the literature. The proof of that is what they produced. It’s the wrong process and it’s consulting the wrong people”, criticizes.