Tarcísio repeated digitalization and stopped full teaching – 12/28/2023 – Education

In its first year in charge of São Paulo, the Tarcísio de Freitas (Republican) government invested in repeating a series of actions carried out in Paraná for education and discontinuing the main banners of the last Tucan administration in the area.

Businessman Renato Feder was chosen by the governor to head São Paulo’s education precisely because he managed, when secretary, to place the southern state at the top of the Ideb (national education evaluation indicator). With the promise of making São Paulo reach first place, Feder decided to replicate the measures he had already adopted.

Thus, the same digitalization process began in schools in São Paulo, with the adoption of applications to control student attendance, digital platforms and games to be used in class and prioritization of digital material based on slides. Everything as had been done in Paraná, including contracts with the same companies.

He also decided that he would stop the policy of expanding full-time enrollment and made new changes to the high school curriculum, three years after it was implemented in schools by the João Doria administration, then in the PSDB.

Graduated in administration and CEO of Multilaser, a technology equipment company, for 15 years, Feder argues that, to achieve good educational results, it is necessary to monitor the work of teachers using metrics. Therefore, it invests in digital tools to monitor classroom activities.

In a statement, the secretariat stated that in this first year of management it took an “important step towards digital inclusion in the network” and that it will continue to pursue the objective of offering more “modern, attractive and efficient” classes.

Experts emphasize, however, that the accelerated process of digitalization of education disregards the reality of schools in São Paulo, as most do not have access to quality internet nor do they have enough computers for students.

It was exactly the attempt to replace printed materials with digital ones that generated one of the main controversies of the Tarcísio government in the area of ​​education. At the end of July, the Sheet revealed that the secretary decided, without consulting teachers, not to receive any more textbooks from the National Textbook Program (PNLD), purchased with funds from the National Education Development Fund, from the Ministry of Education.

His proposal was to exchange printed textbooks for digital material produced by his own team.

After a series of criticisms about the unfeasibility of using only digital material and several errors being found in the handouts prepared by the secretariat, the Tarcísio government announced a partial retreat.

He decided that São Paulo would rejoin the national program to continue receiving printed books, but maintained the production and sending of slides to be used in classes — as had been done in Paraná, in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. In both states, teachers found errors in the materials and complained about the pressure to use them.

The secretary argues that the material produced by his team is more appropriate as it addresses the contents that are required in national assessments, such as the Saeb (Basic Education Assessment System) — which, according to him, guaranteed Paraná to reach first place in the Ideb.

Experts, however, consider the results obtained by state schools in Paraná in the last Ideb to be fragile to serve as a guide for policies to be replicated. They also highlight the differences between the two networks — São Paulo has a more complex structure and greater inequalities, with four times more students than Paraná.

“Firstly, there is no evidence that it was digital tools that guaranteed the improvement of indicators. Secondly, the results verified in such an exceptional year for evaluation, due to the pandemic, need to be looked at with great caution”, says professor Márcia Jacomini, coordinator of Geppege (Research Group on Educational Policy and School Management) at Unifesp.

Inep, responsible for calculating Ideb, warned that the 2021 results may have been artificially impacted due to the pandemic, when schools were instructed not to fail students. The indicator combines pass rates and student performance in Portuguese and mathematics. The state network of Paraná, for example, achieved a higher score on Ideb despite student performance falling in both subjects, compared to 2019.

“This result in Paraná can be considered a success, but a relative success. In fact, there was an increase in the indicator, but it is necessary to consider that there was a different context”, says Claudia Costin, director of the Center for Educational Policies, at FGV.

In a statement, the Department of Education said that it will continue the process of digitizing education in São Paulo and that it intends to invest in 2024 at least R$80 million in installing Wi-Fi, renewing the park of switches and firewalls and offering more notebooks and tablets.

Changes in high school

As he announced as soon as he took office, Renato Feder also stopped the policy of expanding full-time enrollment in São Paulo. This was former governor Doria’s big bet, going from 364 state schools (6% of the total) with the model, in 2018, to 2,312 in 2024, reaching 45% of the entire network.

Such as Sheet showed accelerated expansion, leading students, especially the poorest, to migrate to part-time units or evening education. In November, the TCE (Court of Auditors of the State of São Paulo) warned the Tarcísio government about the need to promote actions to guarantee the access and permanence of the most vulnerable students in the modality.

The ministry did not say whether it plans to restructure the program to guarantee the poorest’s access to full-time employment, only saying that it has slowed down expansion. Next year, only 20 new units will start offering the modality — some of which had already been chosen at the end of last year.

For the program, the secretariat said it plans to invest, through partnerships, R$1.6 billion in the construction and management of 33 units and that it will allocate R$460 million to modernize other schools and expand classrooms.

“The problems of accelerated expansion were created by the previous administration, but the current government cannot turn its back on these schools. They are almost half of the network, there needs to be action to resolve the serious problems that have arisen, such as dropout and migration from the poorest to the nocturnal”, says Jacomini.

The Tarcísio government’s focus is on increasing enrollment in technical education, with the promise of having half of the students in this modality by the end of the mandate. For rapid expansion, with a forecast of offering 100,000 places in 2024, management decided that the courses will be offered within the structure of regular schools.

Another government bet this year was the reformulation of the high school curriculum — in four years, this is the third time that this stage has undergone curricular changes. The Tarcísio administration decided to reduce the offer of training itineraries (part of the curriculum that students choose to deepen), reducing the options from 11 to 2.

Thus, Feder intends to limit the profusion of subjects that were created to cover this optional part. With fewer itineraries, he also included “acceleration for the entrance exam” classes and increased the hours allocated for Portuguese and mathematics, but reduced the load for sociology and philosophy.

The change aims to place more students from the state network in higher education. In this sense, the Tarcísio government also supported the proposal of the three state universities in São Paulo (USP, Unicamp and Unesp) to create a serial entrance exam and, thus, implemented the Provão Paulista. This year, the exam offered more than 15 thousand places.

For Costin, the government’s decision to change the high school curriculum, even before the changes foreseen in national law, was the right one.

“The previous design was not working well, there were many itineraries and students were missing hours of important subjects. Students who are now in high school need quick changes to avoid being harmed”, he says.

In a statement, the Tarcísio administration said that “undoubtedly, one of the most important [ações adotadas neste ano] was the restructuring of the new high school”, because the previous model had a “very negative evaluation, both by students and teachers”.

He also highlighted the creation of Provão Paulista which, according to the ministry, is the “fairest and most direct path we offer students to the best public universities in the country, which are those in São Paulo”.