MEC raised literacy as its main flag, but skipped the theme in 2023

Lula 3’s administration began with promises of progress in the literacy rates of Brazilian children, but, in this first year, the results fell short of expectations. The president even chose managers from Ceará – a reference state in literacy – to occupy the highest positions in the Ministry of Education. With them, the MEC even launched the National Literacy Child Commitment, but it ended up being considered a disappointment to experts as it presented “more of the same” in generic guidelines. The department also had difficulties executing the budget in the area. Meanwhile, the role of the ministry’s minister, Camilo Santana, gained prominence in other matters such as the changes to the New High School and the fight with 100% distance learning undergraduate courses.

The National Literacy Child Commitment was signed in June and wants 100% of Brazilian children to know how to read and write by the end of the 2nd year of elementary school, between six and seven years of age. This is considered by experts to be one of the skills with the greatest impact throughout a student’s school career. With reading and writing well established, students increase their ability to learn other content that will be presented to them.

The problem with the MEC initiative, however, is the lack of indication of concrete measures, based on scientific evidence. In other words, in practice, the documents are harmless.

“The parameters in the documents are generic. A ‘pedagogical’ that is not a lie, but that will not help the municipality either”, considered Fábio Gomes, who for four years held the positions of director and secretary of literacy in the Bolsonaro government.

A People’s Gazette has already spoken about the Commitment’s lack of parameters to effectively measure students’ reading ability. Gomes follows the same line when analyzing the text that gives guidelines for teacher training. “My concern is that with this same document you can have formations that are completely different from each other and that will not necessarily achieve the objective. Because we failed to identify which points exactly should be worked on,” he says.

Even with the literacy flag being raised by the Lula government as the main one of the administration, budgetary problems made it difficult for the actions to progress. Until November 2023, the MEC had not spent a single cent of the R$801 million planned for literacy that year.

By note, the MEC stated that at least R$ 1.2 billion were committed in December to the National Literacy Child Commitment in 2023. Also according to the MEC, the resource was allocated to states and municipalities that joined the program, in addition to scholarship financing for regional organizers and offering training to early childhood education professionals. A People’s Gazette was unable to confirm the information presented by the department in the Integrated Planning and Budget System (Siop).

It is up to the MEC to guide the educational policies of municipalities

Like Camilo Santana, Maria Izolda Cela, executive secretary of the MEC, is also from Ceará. Her position is considered the second most important in a ministry. Maria Izolda even worked at the Education Department of the municipality of Sobral (CE), which has the best literacy rates in Brazil. Camilo Santana and Maria Izolda have also worked together when they assumed, respectively, the positions of governor and vice-governor of the state in 2014 and 2018. Their experience generated a certain expectation of advancement in the area of ​​literacy, but in this first year of management was not consolidated.

The parameters of excellence used in cities like Sobral, for example, are not, by far, mentioned in the continuing education document of the National Literacy Child Commitment. “It is a document that does not talk about fluency in reading, decoding, alphabetical principles. It will probably be another ‘more of the same’ policy. I hope for success, because we are talking about children, but due to the lack of good guidelines it will be difficult”, adds Gomes.

This lack of guidance will not harm cities that have good educational results, as they will continue the work that has been done. At the same time, municipal education departments that need support will not receive the necessary subsidies, as was done in the “Time to Learn” project of the previous government, which tends to further increase educational inequality in the country.

Making children literate by 2nd grade is an old goal

The Commitment’s objective of making 100% of children in the 2nd year of elementary school literate is not innovative. This is goal 5 of the current National Education Plan (PNE), which creates guidelines for actions in education from 2014 to 2024. Goal 5 is divided into the areas of Portuguese language and mathematics. The indicator used is the result of the Saeb (Basic Education Assessment System), applied to measure the knowledge of students in the 2nd year of elementary school 1, 9th year of elementary school 2 and 3rd year of high school.

To evaluate goal 5 of the PNE, the Saeb results for the 2nd year are considered. Although the goal is old, Brazil does not seem close to achieving it. According to the QEdu platform, the percentage of 2nd year public school students with the appropriate level of proficiency in reading fell from 55% in 2019 to 36% in 2021. Between the two editions, there was the Covid-19 pandemic. Brazil was one of the countries that kept schools closed for the longest time, which generated an impact that has not yet been possible to fully measure.

Also according to the 2021 Saeb results, 61% of 2nd year students are between level 0 and 4. 23% of them are at level 0 or 1, which implies the inability to read words with three or more syllables, with image support, based on a saying. Only 39% (levels 5 to 8) were able to demonstrate skills such as locating explicit information in short texts (four to six lines) such as notes, chronicles and fragments of children’s stories, inferring poster subjects and information in texts that use verbal language and not verbal, like comic strips.

“No progress is made because teaching is deficient. An effort is necessary that ends up fighting with political preferences. It is necessary to offer teachers training based on scientific evidence, presenting specific points that will make the student learn much faster. But there is resistance from all sides”, analyzes Fábio Gomes.

When considering the reading level of 2nd year private school students, the drop was much smaller between the 2019 and 2021 editions, going from 82% to 79%. QEdu uses professor Chico Soares’ proficiency scale, which was officially adopted by Inep when the professor held the position of president of the body. Currently, the MEC does not have an official scale. QEdu is a platform created by the Lemann Foundation and the company Meritt, which aims to facilitate access to data and information related to education.

New PNE is under discussion

The MEC even held meetings with internal employees and representatives of other bodies to discuss the new PNE, during the year 2023. The objective was to take stock of the latest plan and raise current educational problems, in order to, from there, prepare goals for the next ten years. However, the work was not completed. Subsequently, the department decided to discuss the matter with states and municipalities during the National Education Conference, which had already been called.

In January, the national stage of the National Education Conference will take place in Brasília. Presented by the MEC, the document used to base discussions at the event deals with several ideological themes. From opposing agribusiness in the classroom to trade union issues such as increasing the minimum wage for teachers. After all the steps, the MEC must present the final text of the PNE to the National Congress. It will be up to opposition parliamentarians to prevent the advancement of ideologization in education by working to change the project.