The National Education Plan (PNE), scheduled to be implemented between 2014 and 2024, is three years away from its final term, with 45% of the targets in the country being set back. The data was revealed this Monday (20) by experts from the National Campaign for the Right to Education, who presented a series of statistics and problems to congressmen in the Senate.
The general coordinator of the National Campaign for the Right to Education, Andressa Pellanda, highlights that the PNE is already coming from a scenario of non-compliance with goals, a process that is now reaching its apex in the face of data that show a non-compliance rate of 86% of the legislation that instituted the PNE, Law No. 13.005/2014.
“We had a setback including access, and not just quality and permanence in education, which is very serious, given the legal framework that we have from the Federal Constitution to the PNE, which provides for the guarantee of the right to education in Brazil. that we did not see such a setback”, he emphasizes.
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Campaign experts have found that the goal of universal access to so-called “nine-year elementary education” for the 6-14 age segment is compromised. The number of children in this age group who do not attend or have not completed this training stage almost doubled from 2020 to 2021: the contingent jumped from 540 thousand to 1.072 million.
There was also a reduction in the percentage of young people who complete elementary school at the appropriate age, which was 81.9% in the second quarter of 2020 and dropped to 81.1% last year.
Other data help to show the seriousness of the situation in the sector. From 2013 until today, there has been growth in the network of technical vocational education at the secondary level only in the public network, where 316 thousand new enrollments have been reached. The private network, on the other hand, went against the grain and decreased in size, with 223,000 fewer enrollments in the period.
The number compromises, for example, the fulfillment of goal 11 of the PNE, which set as a horizon a tripling number of enrollments in this interval. The idea would be to guarantee the quality of the offer of vacancies and a minimum of 50% expansion in this particular segment.
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investments
A part of the setbacks in education can be explained by the poor management of the pandemic in the country, but the divestment scenario is also fundamental for the area. The limits imposed by the Spending Ceiling, approved during the administration of Michel Temer (MDB) and supported by the Bolsonaro government, decisively affected the sector’s budget.
In practice, the cap policy is synonymous with a demanding fiscal adjustment that dehydrated spending in different areas of a social nature. Andressa Pellanda says that Brazil’s stance goes against the grain of a global understanding of the segment’s policies.
“A UN rapporteur for the right to education made a report on covid and education and showed that the countries that best responded to the pandemic were those that increased public investment in public education, and Brazil is pointed out as one of the cases of bad example because we are cutting investments day by day”, highlights the expert.
“The policies raised by the federal government with the implementation of the curriculum base, the reform of medical education, the militarization of schools, the home education agenda [homeschooling], etc. are agendas that go against what the PNE advocates”, exemplifies Pellanda.
The solution to the problems pointed out in the survey inevitably involves the repeal of Amendment 95. The Campaign points out that the fiscal adjustment generates a cascading effect harmful to different sectoral actions in education. “In addition to this amendment having stifled all the goals of the PNE, we have pressure from her so that other policies are also downgraded in terms of funding. This happened in the Fundeb debates”, illustrates Andressa Pellanda.
“Blackout”
The diagnosis carried out by the Campaign also highlights the “data blackout” in education. Eight of the 20 goals of the PNE do not have enough official information to support a qualified technical assessment.
Target 1 of the PNE, for example, which foresaw the universalization of early childhood education in preschool for students aged 4 to 5 by 2016, was not evaluated due to the lack of information. The same goal also aimed to expand the provision of early childhood education to 50% of children up to 3 years old.
The idea would be to reach these two marks by the end of the PNE term, in 2024, but there was no disclosure, for example, of the 2020 edition of the “Continuous Pnad – Education”, formulated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Publication was postponed to 2021, but that deadline was also missed, leaving experts in limbo. The National Campaign for the Right to Education calls for a greater level of transparency with data. In some cases, the data is only obtained through the Access to Information Law (LAI) and, in others, there is no answer.
“We have difficulty evaluating educational policies themselves, and there, therefore, a difficulty for us to direct policies and make them face the educational challenge. Without evaluation, without accurate data, we cannot formulate efficient policies to guarantee the right to education present in people’s lives”, explains Pellanda.
Editing: Thalita Pires
