Study maps educational strategies for pandemics – 11/09/2023 – Education

Coordination between the three spheres of government, expansion of internet access, development of structured teaching materials on digital platforms and even measures to guarantee food security in the school community. These are some of the strategies that should be part of an emergency educational plan in the advent of a new pandemic — which some scientists say is just a matter of time.

The study by a group of researchers from universities in Brazil, Chile, France and French Guiana, financed by Fapesp (São Paulo State Research Support Foundation), focused on the tactics adopted in public education in these countries during the health crisis and pointed out 12 essential strategies to avoid educational losses in pandemic contexts.

Brazil was one of the four countries in the world that kept schools closed for the longest time. And, according to the MEC (Ministry of Education), more than half (56.4%) of students in the 2nd year of elementary school were not literate in 2021 — an increase of 42% compared to 2019, when this percentage was 39 .7%.

The first essential strategy is to strengthen the collaboration regime between the Union, states and municipalities. In Brazil, during Covid-19, the forced and long-lasting transition to a distance learning model occurred in a vacuum of national guidelines from the Ministry of Education under the command of pastor Milton Ribeiro. As a result, each state adopted its own educational strategies, in a scenario of many inequalities.

“The MEC was silent during the pandemic, and each state chose a path that suited them best”, points out Wagner Rezende, professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), in Minas Gerais, and coordinator of the Center for Public and Education Assessment (Caed).

“In France, the coordination of the Union was very strong, and students quickly returned to face-to-face classes”, explains Maria do Carmo Meirelles, professor at Unicid and coordinator of the research “Implementation of educational policies and inequalities in the context of the Covid pandemic -19”.

Another essential strategy, according to the study, is to expand connectivity in schools and municipalities, with access to the internet and devices such as notebooks, tablets and cell phones.

According to data from IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), almost 84% of Brazilian public school students had access to the internet when the pandemic began, but 4.1 million of them did not have this access.

At the same time, researchers warn, it is necessary to increase the digital literacy of students and teachers, who need to receive training to use digital technologies in a pedagogical way.

“Materials that guide teachers and students on what needs to be learned is always important. In the context of a crisis, it is crucial and establishes minimum criteria for learning and assessment. Therefore, it is something that needs to be done before the next pandemic”, explains Rodnei Pereira, education researcher at Fundação Carlos Chagas and Unicid.

The researchers detected that, during the health crisis, there was a lack of information systems in Brazil between departments and schools and, between these, their employees and students. “There were teachers who didn’t have an email address. There were schools that didn’t have contact with students’ families, and the teachers went to the students’ homes to get this contact,” says Meirelles. Creating an information system and keeping it updated, she points out, will contribute to faster actions in the next pandemic, as well as investing in the link between schools and families, essential for the success of distance learning, with students at home .

Furthermore, it is important to have reception plans for teachers and students, psychological support and measures to ensure food security for the school community, as many children have lunch as their main meal of the day.

“What we saw happen in São Paulo, Fortaleza and Minas Gerais was that, by converting lunches into food kits for families, schools played a fundamental role in guaranteeing food security in the territory as a whole”, says Pereira.

Finally, the research reaffirms the importance of active search programs for students who drop out of school.

“In many states, the community itself was involved in this search, in a commitment to guarantee education”, reports Meirelles. “São Paulo used mothers to go after evading students, while other locations gave grants so that the students themselves could go in search of their classmates who dropped out of school.”

Data collected from supplementary questionnaires applied by the School Census in 2021 indicate that, of nine strategies investigated in public education networks, the one that received the most support was active search: 89.9% of Brazilian state schools adopted the strategy. Ceará was where the most schools carried out these searches (96.9%), followed by Goiás (94.9%) and Espírito Santo (94.9%).

Schools in Ceará were also the ones that prioritize specific content and skills the most (90.4%), given the impossibility of meeting everything planned, followed by those in the Federal District (86%) and Espírito Santo (85.3%). At the other extreme, this occurred in just 32.9% of the network in the state of Roraima.

Student learning gaps were assessed in 2021 in 94.3% of the Espírito Santo network, followed by schools in São Paulo (89.9%) and Ceará (89.5%).

In this scenario of state inequalities, it was the states of Ceará and Espírito Santo that most adopted many of the 2021 strategies investigated by the School Census.

“It’s no surprise that Ceará and Espírito Santo are states with historical trajectories of cooperation between state and municipalities and learning programs at the right age”, explains Pereira, from the Carlos Chagas Foundation. “And this performance may be a product of the strengthening of these policies.”

The Ceará case gained prominence in the research because the state was the only one to apply an assessment test to students at the beginning of 2022, which made it possible to measure the effect of the pandemic on students’ learning in Portuguese and mathematics at the end of the health crisis and, after , your recovery. 5th and 9th grade students from Ceará recovered or even exceeded pre-pandemic levels of performance considered adequate.

Ceará has become a case study in the country since the Cerca Age Learning Program (Paic) was implemented in 2007, and its results began to be measured. The program involves improving school management, continuing teacher training, diagnostic assessment of students at the beginning and end of each year, among other measures that have allowed for better school success rates in the last decade.

Ceará’s politics were nationalized by the MEC in 2012 through the National Pact for Literacy at the Right Age (Pnaic). The program, put aside by the governments of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro (PL), was resumed by Lula (PT), who has the former governor of Ceará Camilo Santana as Minister of Education, with the National Literacy Child Commitment, launched in last June.