MEC wants more full-time schools. Understand pros and cons

In January, the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, expressed his desire to expand the offer of full-time education in public schools in Brazil. The measure may have some positive points, such as temporarily mitigating young people’s contact with crime, but researchers and specialists in education warn of the ineffectiveness of full-time learning, the exorbitant costs to the detriment of the low benefit that this type of education entails. , and for the focus error, which should be on the quality of teaching offered, and not on the number of hours in the classroom.

Santana said, in an interview with the newspaper The State of S. Paulo, who defends the expansion of full-time teaching “in all grades”, but that planning for this will begin with secondary education and the last grades of elementary school, which, according to him, are “the most delicate years for young people”. “It is a protection policy for children. The greatest violence prevention policy is to implement full-time schooling at all levels,” he said.

The theme is raised at the federal level at the same time that its debate comes to the fore in several state departments of education. In Ceará, for example, the government recently announced that it will create another 80 full-time high schools, which will make more than 70% of the state network in Ceará work in extended hours. In Paraná, Governor Ratinho Junior (PSD) announced that another 86 public institutions will offer full-time education, totaling 253 schools and covering 55,000 students.

In São Paulo, on the other hand, governor Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans) wants to curb the accelerated expansion that the Doria government promoted in the provision of full-time education. In a recent interview with Rádio Bandeirantes, Tarcísio said that “it’s no use having full-time schools if the school doesn’t have infrastructure”. “Today you have, mainly in peripheral regions, little supply of classrooms, crowded classrooms”, he commented.

Full-time institutions, for him, may end up devaluing education professionals. “Let’s say: ‘Ah, I’m going to set up a full-time school…’ That professional who had to work at two different schools to guarantee his livelihood, when he is tied to a single school, he will not have recourse. The full-time school only makes sense if I have the necessary bonus to keep that professional in a single school.”

The national trend of growth in the provision of integral education in the public network follows a determination of the National Education Plan (PNE) of 2013. The goal 6 of the PNE is to offer education in this model in at least 50% of public schools, meeting the least 25% of students.

The implementation of full-time public schools in Brazil began before the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), however, with the More Education Program, created in 2007. The idea of ​​the project was to extend the school day in public institutions to at least 7 hours daily, with the provision of optional activities such as environmental education, digital culture, communication and use of media, research in the field of natural sciences and economic education.

Focus should be on improving the quality of teaching, not increasing the amount of time, say experts

For Ilona Becskeházy, former Secretary of Basic Education at MEC and columnist for People’s Gazette, there is no point in increasing the amount of time young people spend in school without improving the quality of curricula, which have been a thorn in the side of basic education in Brazil. “Without a curriculum, we can have classes 24/7 that won’t change anything”, he criticizes.

The expert considers that expanding the supply of full-time schools will serve as a pretext for increasing investment with little expected return. “The left always likes to spend more and hire more. And there is no better hostage to justify spending than a student who does not learn”, she observes.

Educator Anamaria Camargo, president and executive director of Livre pra Escolhar, says that full-time public schools tend to function, to a certain extent, “like a deposit for children”. “There’s a lot of that thought that ‘it’s better to leave it at school than on the street, because there’s violence, because there’s drug trafficking’. In this social aspect, it may even play a role, but, educationally speaking, there is no gain”, she comments.

For her, it is necessary to think above all about the cost-benefit ratio, and the evidence on the results obtained with integral education does not justify the increase in expenses. “Is it worth spending 2% of GDP on ‘adolescent deposits’? Wouldn’t other measures be better? We know that, with the projects that usually come up, with the same teachers, with the same students, those 2% of GDP are unlikely to turn into quality education.”

Anamaria recalls that most of the people who enroll in Pedagogy courses perform poorly at school, and that it is these same people who will lead the classrooms in full-time institutions. “Without wanting to belittle the good will of the teachers, the effort. But in cognitive terms, in terms of preparation, Brazil selects its teachers very poorly. To enter a Pedagogy course, to be a teacher, the level of demand is very low. We select among the worst. And it’s this same group of people who are hired for after school hours,” she says.

The perspective of results tends to be even lower taking into account some changes implemented by the New Secondary School – a reform project foreseen in the BNCC that began to be implemented in 2022. Recently, newspaper report The globe showed that traditional disciplines have lost space in some schools, while subjects such as “RPG”, “Brigadeiro homemade” and “Mundo Pets SA” appear. The change is part of a process foreseen by the BNCC called “training itineraries”, which seeks to bring to the school some areas of knowledge that would be of interest to students.

For Anamaria, this is one more reason why the expansion of full-time teaching tends to give little result. “It probably won’t have any effect in terms of the student’s academic preparation. They’ll fill the time using these weird disciplines, like ‘homemade brigadeiro’ or stuff like that.”

Research reveals the ineffectiveness of full-time teaching in the learning of public school students

Ilona Becskeházy considers that the lack of scientific basis is another problem in the decision to expand full-time teaching. For her, the measure will imply an increase in expenses without foreseeing benefits, since the extension of students’ time in schools has not been proven effective by scientific research. “Like any design of public policies, it is necessary to use scientific evidence to guide spending”, she says.

In 2019, researcher Juliana Viana Gandra, a doctoral student at the Center for Development and Regional Planning at the Faculty of Economic Sciences (Cedeplar) at UFMG, found in quantitative research that the Mais Educação Program, which expands full-time education, worsened average performance of students in the Portuguese and Mathematics assessments of Prova Brasil.

“In the analyzed sample, Mais Educação contributed negatively to the average performance (except in some cases where the effect was non-existent). The results found indicate the possibility of problems in the design of the program, and, developed the way they are, the activities proposed to students may be inefficient to promote the skills that are required in standardized tests such as Prova Brasil”, said the study.

The researcher presents some hypotheses for the drop in performance, such as the possibility that the profile of students who decided to go to the Mais Educação Program schools is different from the average student enrolled in a single shift. “Studies have found that the presence of Mais Educação reduces failure and dropout rates. It is natural to intuit that these students who had the help of the program to stay in school or progress through the year have a lower performance than the others”, she explains.

Another hypothesis, according to her, is “the lack of connection between the activities developed by students in the program and the skills required in the Prova Brasil tests”. “Schools participating in the program are not necessarily working on subjects related to the contents required in the Prova Brasil in the after-school hours”, she says.

For Anamaria Camargo, instead of increasing the use of resources for projects with uncertain results, Brazilian public education should focus on the best application of “a minimal, lean and robust curriculum”. “Once that is guaranteed, then they start teaching how to make brigadeiro. But, first, it has to earn the resources we put there. Year after year, investment and spending on education increase, and the results continue to be dismal. There was no improvement in performance in Pisa [Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Alunos]. Zero,” he states.