Vague MEC literacy parameters worry experts

The Ministry of Education (MEC) is treating literacy as its main flag and a few weeks ago launched the National Literate Child Commitment, its policy to subsidize actions in states and municipalities related to the theme. MEC’s ​​goal is to ensure that all Brazilian children are literate by the end of the 2nd year of elementary school, according to some new parameters established at the end of May to define a literate student.

Literacy experts consulted by People’s Gazette consider, however, that the defined parameters are vague and ideological, and fear that the little objective measurement of students’ reading and writing ability misrepresents reality and favors the perpetuation of functional illiteracy in Brazil.

The new criteria were elaborated within the scope of the Alfabetiza Brasil survey, which gathered opinions from a panel with hundreds of teachers from all over the country. The MEC defined that a literate student is one who reaches 743 points in Portuguese on the proficiency scale of the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb).

“This scale actually assesses the Portuguese language, it does not assess literacy”, observes Renan Sargiani, PhD in School Psychology and Human Development at USP. For him, the criteria proposed by the MEC lack objectivity.

According to the ministry, students who reach a score of 743 “read small texts, made up of short periods and locate information on the textual surface”, produce “basic inferences based on the articulation between verbal and non-verbal text, such as comic strips and stories in comics” and “they also write, with spelling deviations, texts that circulate in everyday life for the purpose of simple communication: inviting, remembering something, for example”.

“These criteria are unstable – for example: understanding comics… It is not clear, it is not objective. words read per minute, reading speed… These criteria would be more objective, but they are not used as criteria to decide what is a reader and what is a non-reader in Brazil”, says Sargiani.

Bolsonaro’s PNA, which had objective parameters, was revoked

João Batista Oliveira, president of Instituto Alfa e Beto and doctor in Education from Florida State University, says that the concept of literacy employed by the current MEC “is not literacy”. “It mixes apples with apples, it mixes reading with understanding… The only interesting thing that the Bolsonaro government has done in this area was a formal document, based on scientific evidence, scientific literature and written by competent people, defining very well what literacy is. new government ignores this, turns to a kind of ‘general assembly’ and asks: ‘General assembly, people of Brazil, what do you think literacy is?’ It’s a step backwards and it’s a mistake,” he comments.

The document Oliveira refers to is the result of the National Literacy Policy (PNA), instituted in April 2019 by the Bolsonaro government and revoked at the beginning of the Lula administration. Its main differential was to establish scientifically based objective parameters to define literacy.

The PNA privileged the educational policy “beans and rice” of literacy, establishing simple and clear principles of what it means to be literate. It emphasized, among other things, reading fluency and the idea of phonemic awarenessa fundamental component of literacy, which consists of helping the child to understand how words are formed by sounds and how these sounds relate to written letters.

In the view of certain currents of pedagogy in Brazil, expressions like these in a federal document are a kind of profanation of the modernizing canon of education – which, many times, ends up favoring more ideological than scientific principles. A quick Google search for reports by left-wing vehicles about the PNA in 2019 presents an army of specialists with the same bias condemning the imposition of the “phonic method” – which, incidentally, is a misinterpretation of the PNA, which did not speak to impose methods.

For Sargiani, the lack of reference to phonemic awareness in the new literacy parameters is unscientific. “They need to look at what the evidence is showing. The evidence shows that there are fundamental curriculum components. How can you recommend, nowadays, in literacy, a material that doesn’t work on phonological awareness? You can’t. If you’re using science , you can’t. It’s not enough to ask teachers what practices they use. This is completely anecdotal evidence. This is not real science”, he criticizes.

Oliveira highlights the same problem: “Who defines these things is not the ‘general assembly’. Whoever has the authority to define these things is a specialist. A specialist is the guy who knows the literature. they know the literature. The proof is what they produced. It’s the wrong process and it’s consulting the wrong people”.

A People’s GazetteMEC’s ​​Secretary of Basic Education, Katia Schweickardt, says that the ministry established, before the revocation of Bolsonaro’s document, “a deep analysis of the elements that constituted the former National Literacy Policy”.

“For this, we dialogued with the staff of the Ministry of Education who were part of the former Literacy Secretariat and participated in the entire process of implementing the Policy. We also dialogued with specialists and technicians from the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research – INEP Finally, we dialogued with the National Union of Municipal Education Directors (Undime) and the National Council of State Secretaries of Education (Consed). It was in this democratic, dialogical and collaborative spirit that we built consensus and the decision to revoke the National Policy of Literacy”, explains Katia.

Current MEC has managers who believe in evidence-based literacy

Sargiani points out that, among the current members of the MEC, there are some who participated in good experiences of managing literacy policies in Brazil and who are not averse to the agenda of literacy based on scientific evidence – the government of Ceará, for example, where he worked the current Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, was not closed to this. The state has better results than the Brazilian average in literacy. Sargiani regrets, however, that these specialists are following another type of booklet in the current government.

“I’ve worked with them myself. The secretary [de Educação Básica do MEC] Katia [Schweickardt], for example, I worked with her, I was appointed by her to build the municipal literacy policy in Manaus, when she was secretary in Manaus. And there we built a very good understanding. She is a super enlightened person, who has a lot to add, like the minister himself. [Camilo] Santana; but they need to stop following the book of ideologies, and follow what the polls say”, he says.

In Katia’s view, “the idea that, from Brasilia, “the infallible method of teaching reading and writing for all classrooms, schools and teaching systems in the country” will be established “. “The National Literate Child Commitment is a call for every teacher, every school, every municipality and every state in Brazil to commit to an integrated effort for the right to read and write for all our children. The ministry’s role is to induce policies and support this great community, in a dialogical, democratic and emancipatory perspective”, he says.

According to her, the MEC “respects the autonomy of federal entities, schools and literacy teachers”, and reserves for them “the competence to define which are the best strategies, methodological procedures and didactic choices capable of producing good reading learning experiences and of writing, that make sense in the different territories of that country”.

Katia guarantees that Brazil will continue to participate in PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study – International Study of Progress in Reading), an international assessment of the reading ability of 10-year-old students that the country took part for the first time during the Bolsonaro government.

“Brazil will participate in all the efforts that the international community builds to produce evidence that will help to improve our educational policies. This includes PIRLS and other instruments that can dialogue with our realities and with our history and trajectory of evaluation policy” , it says.

For Katia, “there is a biased conception that, many times, wants to re-edit a war between literacy methods that the good science of education has overcome a long time ago”. “Our view on this topic is very simple and, at the same time, challenging: we want all teachers to feel effectively capable of teaching and that all Brazilian children have the right to learn to read and write, at the right time.”

João Batista Oliveira says that this relativization means “ignoring science”. “It’s the same problem with flat earthism. There’s a cognitive science about reading, an international science, tested in different cultures. For most people, this works and works better than other things. Some people learn by themselves or learn by someone else way, but for most it is not. If there are loads of evidence accumulated, not doing so is the equivalent of malpractice. You are violating a code of ethics. It’s absolutely terrifying that you live in a country, especially a country of illiterates, where the governments don’t take it extremely seriously. you have a thing [a alfabetização] which is fundamental, which is the basis of schooling; there is solid evidence that something works to teach literacy to most children, including the poorest children, and they pretend it doesn’t exist: ‘Let’s let the teachers invent it, because that’s silly'”, he comments.