The neighborhood school as a transformative asset – 05/30/2023 – Policies and Justice

When searching for real estate ads on the websites of the largest real estate agencies in the country, several attributes of each region are highlighted. Proximity to mass transit, markets, hospitals, public parks, cinemas, malls. But few advertisements indicate the existence of schools in the region and, among those that do, none seem to be concerned with the quality of the neighborhood school.

The idea that social mobility is linked exclusively to income has been losing ground in recent years. New elements that help structure people’s lives began to be perceived in a complementary way. Access to summer courses, private libraries, cultural trips, networking helps to understand how the lives of some can be positively transformed.

Such transformative assets constitute a chain of advantages and disadvantages passed from generation to generation that allow the maintenance of social classes or the advancement to other classes. The quality of the public school offered in a given neighborhood can be a transformative asset insofar as it helps to balance the offer of opportunities, as described by Professor Thomas M. Shapiro, who has been popularizing the concept.

In research carried out under the title “Intergenerational Discrimination and the Teaching of the Black Population in the City of São Paulo”, I sought to cross-check data on the quality of state schools in the city of São Paulo with the concentration of the black population, income distribution and life expectancy in each subprefecture of the city.

The results indicated that the various factors inherent to low average wages intensified the lack of access to good public schools; the greater concentration of the worst schools in the black majority neighborhoods; concentration, inversely, of the best schools in the white majority neighborhoods; and that life expectancy is one more element that reinforces the exclusionary nature of good education for those who live in neighborhoods with higher mortality rates.

Researcher Adriano Senkevics found, in his doctoral thesis, that inequalities in access to higher education, for the most part, are directly related to the quality of the schools that the group under analysis had access to. The thesis, which received the CAPES 2022 Award, accompanied more than one million young people for five years.

In a space that is configured as a technical-scientific-informational environment, as described by the geographer Milton Santos, educational policies that seek to reduce inequalities need to look at the territory – and at the individuals who inhabit it.

After the race towards the universalization of basic education in recent decades, the quality of education offered has become the main objective of national public education. The country’s strongly heterogeneous federalism intensifies the challenges in coordinating education on a national scale. The different education networks still have a decision-making process that is not centralized or shared very little.

To overcome the scenario of inequality in education and articulate educational policy nationally, a bill is being discussed in the Chamber of Deputies that intends to establish the National Education System (SNE). Widely supported by the scientific community, the SNE may, if well implemented, contribute to transforming the schools in each neighborhood into vectors of opportunities.

Editor Michael França requests that each participant in the space “Politics and Justice” of the Sheet suggest a song to the readers. In this text, the one chosen by Gabriel Prado was “Continuation of a dream” by rapper BK’.

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