Quota Law: rapporteur wants assistance for quota holders – 03/21/2023 – Education

New rapporteur for the Quotas Law in the Chamber, federal deputy Dandara Tonantzin (PT-MG) argues that quota holders have priority access to the aid offered within the National Student Assistance Plan to minimize cases of evasion at universities.

In her opinion, this would prevent the university from having to define which students would meet criteria for accessing resources for housing, food and transportation.

“We need to ensure that quota students are able to enter, stay and graduate with quality, because there is a huge gap between the number of quota students who enter and those who actually manage to finish graduation”, says the deputy.

The bottleneck for quota holders to stay at the university is one of the main problems of the current law pointed out in the report by the commission of jurists on combating racism in the Chamber of Deputies. Drafted in 2021, the document was drafted by the current Minister of Human Rights, Silvio Almeida.

“Today, the university is responsible for a lot. It has to take what little budget it has and define who suffers the most, who is the poorest, who needs it most. We don’t want the university to be alone in this struggle of having to define who receives a scholarship, who does not”, he argues.

“[Queremos] guarantee the priority of quota holders in these exchanges. In some universities, quota holders already receive a few more points in this selection process, but we want this to be within the law”, says the deputy, who was a quota holder in graduation.

Tonantzin also argues that the revision of the law should not occur every ten years, as it is today, but more frequently. He also understands that, in addition, there must be instruments for monitoring and evaluation at least once a year.

According to her, the Neabs (Núcleos de Estudos Afro-Brasileiros) could help in this task, submitting reports to the university superior councils annually to the Ministry of Education. Every five years, he suggests, the agency could produce a compilation and, why not, carry out a review.

The Quotas Law, approved in 2012, provided for a review of the program only within a period of ten years —that is, in 2022. At the time, however, the black movement itself asked for the postponement of this process, first due to the electoral period, but also by the assessment that the then Bolsonaro government had not produced enough technical data to support the debate.

Tonantzin says that periodic review and evaluation instruments would oblige the government to produce such data with greater constancy, reducing the ideological influence on the application and effectiveness of the law.

“We need to leave measures to repair rights, equity, a little more structured so that they are not at the mercy of governments”, he says.

For her, the periodic review would also serve to reduce crimes related to the law. “With this monitoring, we would fight fraudsters and Afroconvenience”, she says.

Afroconvenience is the term used to designate a subject who, for example, declares himself black or white when it suits him best. In the 2022 elections, several candidates who changed their racial classification in relation to the 2018 election were criticized for doing so.

Still in the fight against fraud and Afro-convenience, she intends to increase in the text of the law the obligation of instances of verification of racial self-declaration, such as the hetero-identification commissions —a group that evaluates whether a candidate is eligible or not for quotas.

Such commissions are already used by several educational institutions in the country, but currently on their own initiative.

In his assessment, it is also necessary to expand the scope of quotas to more segments of society —names, for example, quilombolas or the LGBTQIA+ community—, and also to try to embrace postgraduate studies.

However, he admits that these are points that should face special resistance in Congress and that perhaps there is no way to approve them at this moment.

“It’s already difficult to debate access to undergraduate courses, there is resistance. A black person who went to university is a son of a boss who stopped going, because that’s what is at stake. In graduate school there is a smaller space and the level of resistance is proportional to the specialization of the space”, he says.

“It would demand more effort from us, more articulation and we will have to do a scenario analysis and see what can come in [na nova redação da lei] and what doesn’t,” he adds.

According to her, there is an agreement with the mayor, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), so that the project is guided when it is considered mature enough.

To this end, it intends to hold a series of public hearings with civil society over the next two months, as well as meetings with congressmen and members of the government to prepare a text that can be put to a vote in the House at the end of that period.

On the other hand, there are also proposals in Congress not only for the end of the law, but also for other changes that it considers a step backwards, for example the replacement of racial quotas by income-only criteria.

“Conservative sectors are working to put an end to quotas. So, we don’t even need to have a very robust project, a very daring report, for them to arm themselves against us. Just the fact that the quota law exists already contributes to this” , he says.

The most important thing, says the deputy, is to ensure that the review takes place so that the law, which as the Sheet has been transforming the profile of university students, stay active.

“The Quota Law will only end when structural racism ends, it is a continuous policy. As long as blacks are treated differently in society… when we balance this scale for real, we can start talking about the end. It has been 400 years of slavery, just over 100 years since its abolition. In ten years we have not made reparation. It will take a little longer”, says Dandara.