MEC bets on PT’s bankrupt logic against precarious literacy

Brazil ranked 60th out of 65 participants in its first appearance in the main international test on literacy in the world, the PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). Students in the 4th year of elementary school (10 years old) in Brazil scored less in reading skills than those from countries with an HDI (Human Development Index) lower than the national one, such as Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.

The literacy situation in the country, precarious for decades, was aggravated by the social isolation measures promoted during the Covid-19 pandemic, as already revealed by Inep (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira). A few weeks ago, the agency presented the results of a survey showing that the number of children aged 7 to 8 who cannot read and write practically doubled between 2020 and 2022.

The seriousness of the problem is recognized by the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, who, since the beginning of his mandate, has promised to prioritize literacy among children up to the 2nd year of elementary school. But, for the time being, the strategy devised for this mimics the bankrupt logic of previous PT mandates: increasing state funding for education by betting on the direct relationship between invested value and quality of learning.

The universalization of education, proclaimed by the PT as an achievement of its management, can mean, in practice, only the universalization of school enrollment. For decades, a good part of Brazilian students go through the elementary school years without having learned the most basic skill that a school should contemplate: reading.

According to PIRLS, around 38% of Brazilian students are functionally illiterate at age 10 and have not mastered even the most basic reading skills, such as retrieving information explicitly stated in the text. According to the National Curricular Common Base (BNCC), students should be literate between the 1st and 2nd years of elementary school – that is, between 7 and 8 years old, much earlier than the age assessed by PIRLS.

“These are catastrophic numbers, because children have to be literate in the first year. This shows that our elementary schools are not working”, says professor Adriano Naves de Brito, former secretary of Education in Porto Alegre.

Brazil’s situation in PIRLS refers to tests applied to children who were ten years old between October 2020 and July 2022 – that is, who entered elementary school between approximately 2017 and 2019, before the Covid-19 crisis. The impact of the pandemic’s social isolation measures could make the country’s results even worse in future assessments.

“We were one of the countries that kept schools closed for the longest time in the world. And the only innocent people in this story were the children, because the left wanted to close, and the right did not make an effort to open”, says Brito.

What can be done to solve the literacy problem

Ilona Becskeházy, PhD in Educational Policy from PUC-RJ and former Secretary of Basic Education at the Ministry of Education (MEC), says that Brazil’s result in PIRLS was predictable. “It is only surprising that there are other countries that are behind Brazil”, she ironizes.

Brazil joined PIRLS in 2019 on the initiative of Carlos Nadalim, former Secretary of Literacy. For her, the country was late in the evaluation. “A question we have to ask is: why did Brazil only join PIRLS through the hands of a secretary in the Bolsonaro government, in 2019? PIRLS has existed since 1999. Why didn’t we join before? initiative that allows for great reflections on what is taught to students, especially in elementary education, which is the main focus of the exam”, he observes.

The children’s performance, according to her, is a reflection of what Brazilian public schools are like, which “do not set out to teach reading and writing”. “They propose to teach texts on all that is a subject that is in fashion, but literacy schools do not propose to teach. When they propose in a serious way, they teach. sometimes it’s the families,” he says.

Educator Anamaria Camargo, president and executive director of Livre pra Escolha, sees no room for pretexts: children enrolled in schools have to know how to read.

“We need to ensure already literacy up to the age of 7 for 100% of the children attended in public schools. Absolutely any increase in public spending supposedly aimed at education that does not directly contribute to this end must be suspended until this objective is achieved. If, for that, it is necessary to make partnerships with the private sector, so be it”, he says.

In her view, public-private partnerships with consistent and ambitious metrics, whose renewal depended on the results, would be advantageous. “For this, managers must be able to use Fundeb resources [Fundo de Manutenção e Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica]in addition to having the autonomy to hire, evaluate, award and fire people”, he says.

For Adriano Naves de Brito, pedagogical solutions will not be enough: it is necessary to change the school management model. “A lot can be done, in fact, to improve our pedagogical resources and our literacy methodologies. But I don’t believe that this is the very first problem to be faced. No pedagogical modification that we want to introduce in schools will work if the schools don’t work”, he says.

Brazil, according to him, already invests a lot in education, but does not use these resources well. One way out, for Brito, would be non-state public schools, a model he sought to implement as Secretary of Education in Porto Alegre. These are institutions with private management, but paid by the government for the needy population.

Private management of schools, in his view, would improve the type of service offered without being more costly than public management. “Around 85% of basic education in Brazil is in state public schools. Private schools, which work much better, are a niche of the middle class that can afford school. There is a state monopoly on public education.”

The reason for this monopoly, according to Brito, is the corporatism of teachers’ unions and other associations that “organize systems to favor themselves and not the students”. “There are a lot of good people wanting to do a good job in schools, but corporations dominate the guidelines. Schools, therefore, are organized around corporate guidelines, and the manager cannot change them”, he comments.

What Camilo Santana intends to do

Minister Camilo Santana has reiterated that he wants to treat literacy up to the second year as a MEC priority for the coming years. There is, however, no prediction that partnership with the private sector will be one of the main paths for this.

“All the specialists say that the most important phase for children are the initial years, when they are easy to learn. We need to guarantee literacy at the right age”, said Santana, in early May, in a hearing of the Education Commission of the Senate.

Last Thursday (18), he was in João Pessoa to announce a partnership with the government of Paraíba in this regard. Santana’s focus is to provide more resources to state managers responsible for elementary education.

The announcement of prioritization of literacy in the appropriate age group is not new in a PT government: in 2012, former president Dilma Rousseff announced a contribution of R$ 2.7 billion for this purpose.

For Adriano Naves de Brito, prioritizing literacy at the right age is fundamental, but the path that has been pointed out by the new minister, of transferring resources to state managers, has already proved to be flawed.

“His proposals go towards strengthening the corporation [de associações, sindicatos de professores etc.]. We’re going to put more money into a system whose results don’t justify more funding,” she says.

For Ilona Becskeházy, without aggressive and clear goals, no program will have a real impact on children’s lives. The solution, according to her, is to “put as an order, as a goal, as mandatory, that Brazilian students have to be literate, reading 60 words per minute, clearly, with understanding, by the end of the first school year”.