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The
proposal by FUNDEB – despite the extension of federal
financing of public education beyond the elementary level –
has been criticized by educational
and social organizations for excluding early childhood
education and daycare centers for the attendance of children
of zero-three years old. If the proposal was ratified in its
present form it
would have a negative impact on the access to education of the
youngest children of low-income
mothers.
In
2005, the educational policies of the federal government
continued the projects and programs of its previous years
without, however, fulfilling the election promises made by the
current administration of President Luís Inácio Lula da
Silva. Here we analyze the Federal plan while, at the same
time, recognizing the role of state and municipal agencies
have played in implementing a plan to improve school
attendance.
It
is a case of the Management and Development Fund for Primary
Education (FUNDEB) acting in accordance with the proceedings
of the National Congress. The Federal initiative (under Lula)
merely imported the policies of the Basic Education
Development and Aid Fund (FUNDEF) from 1998 (under the Fernando
Henrique
Cardoso
administration). Its financing of education was only for
children from the ages of seven to 14 years.
These
policies excluded funding for early childhood and pre-K
education as well as for young adult education. Currently,
this continuation of FUNDEF policies assists 32 million
students. With the creation of FUNDEB, an estimated 47 million
students could have received assistance with the inclusion of
all student groups: Early childhood, pre-K and young adults in
all municipal and state systems, as well as professional,
adult, rural, indigenous and special populations.
The
logic of the policies remains the same: States without the
resources to make a minimum investment in students at the
state and municipal levels of education would receive
complementary resources from the federal government.
The
proposal by FUNDEB to extend the federal financing of public
education beyond the elementary level
has been criticized by
educational and social organizations for excluding
early childhood education and daycare centers for the
attendance of children zero-three years old. If the proposal
was ratified in its present form it would have a negative
impact on the access to education of the youngest children of
low-income mothers and mothers-to-be.
In
an attempt to reverse the situation, organizations that act in
the interests of educational rights and women’s rights
mobilized and made efforts, during the long year that was
2005, to include day-care centers in the proposed legislation.
However, subjected to financial restrictions imposed by (the
administration’s) economic policy, the program has moved
through the National Congress without alterations.
The
new Federal Fund, FUNDEB, still contains a reference, imported
from FUNDEF, to the Cost of Student Quality, which is by
FUNDEF’s definition, the value that must be invested, per
pupil, to guarantee a quality education. The law establishing
FUNDEF foresaw a definition of this value, which was never
accomplished. The only
measure of this value that was completed considered the tax
that could be imposed to collect funds to pay for it, rather
than the actual necessities of such an education. Thus
an actual value was not determined by the Federal Government,
but what it generated was a state and municipal debt on the
order of R$19 billion (US$8.6 billion) since the inception of
FUNDEF by the Cardoso administration.
The
Lula government has not sufficiently respected the
establishment of a Cost of Student Quality to repass it in its
version of a basic education fund. FUNDEB
did not mention a definition of the Cost of Student Quality,
not even as a value to be foreseen.
A
social movement organized as the National Campaign for the
Right to Education has arisen with the intention to establish
a single, national value of the cost per student for a quality
education. The Campaign promotes debates based on the notion
that the amount of money budgeted for education must be
directly related to the costs necessary to guarantee quality
public education, based on the historic diversities in the
country, not just on economic policy. This
implies defining a value for the satisfaction of this
objective, not for its negation, so that when budgetary
surpluses do occur, as happened recently with the payment of
debts, surpluses are not simply reinvested in the public
policies that created that debt in the first place.
Another
collision – between the practices of the Federal Government
and the expectations of civil society – occured over the
organization of the National Conference for the Right to
Education. The
processes of popular participation in the Federal Constitution
of 1988 have already taken place and have been instituted in
various areas and segments of government and society – until
this moment, in this government, when a national conference
making possible a public debate on the subject of education
– with national impact and government endorsement – ran
into the government’s own inability to take a position on
education policy.
The
Lula government, in virtue of the historical commitments
assumed by his Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT) with regard to citizen participation in other areas (such as
the promotion of racial equality and equality for women, for
which specific conferences had been organized), for the first
time raised expectations that this process would also be
accomplished in the area of education.
In
2004, the Ministry of Education (MEC) promoted the formation
of a mediation group involving social organizations and the
government to bring about the conference. The main idea, which
would be part of developing a theme, was to create municipal
conferences that would support
state conferences, which in turn would send delegations to the
national event.
The
process, however, was aborted by the MEC for fear that the
mobilization of the conferences gave visibility to critical
issues to which the government would be vulnerable in the
electoral dynamics that lied ahead in the coming election year
and would bring to the fore the political crisis that deeply
defined 2005. In this case, convenience politics was of higher
importance than the commitment to social participation in the
paths of public politics.
Little
was also done to carry out political reforms that could
improve the process of participatory democracy in education
– or in city councils, state and federal ones. There
are still other participatory mechanisms that could be
fortified with the goal of extending social control of the
public politic, as was the case with the Fundef council, which
could monitor the use of public funds.
Agenda
politics, driven by the MEC, also ran over education. The
political crisis involving the Workers Party, initiated six
months into 2005, precipitated the second change of government
ministers in three years. Urgently called to try to reorganize
the PT, the former minister of
Education (and ex-president
of the PT) Tarso Genro was replaced by Fernando Haddad.
Increasing
Access
In
concrete terms, to increase access to education, the Federal
Government implemented Programa Universidade para Todos (PROUNI),
ot the “University Program for All.” In its first year,
PROUNI sponsored 112,416 scholarships to institutions of
higher education for public school students with family income
less than the minimum wage, and for basic education teachers
without higher education.
Of
the scholarships offered, 41.54% were destined by quota
systems to go to students of African descent.
In
accordance with the MEC, PROUNI helped about 50,000 students
of African descent to attend Brazilian universities.
Before the program, 25 percent of public and private
school students were of African descent, which corresponded to
a total of 875,000 black students among 3.5 million pupils.
According
to MEC, an aditional five percent of black students were added
in the first six months of 2005, bring the number of black
students in higher education to 921,695. Without a doubt, it
is a positive result. However,
compensatory policies such as these would have to be
instituted for the majority of the poor people in the country
to sufficiently improve attendance in the public system of
education in order to create a system that would enable
university attendance to be truly open to all.
Final
Considerations
An
important factor verified in the analysis of the politics of
education in these last two years is that achieving the right
to education is related to limited taxation for education and
subsequent budgetary restrictions.
It is evident
that these factors impact the accomplishment of many other
rights as well, in underdeveloped countries as well as in
developed ones. However,
the current economic policy reserves a great part of the
budget, as well as the increasing primary surplus, for the
payment of interest. Thus it eliminates an effective
transference of income to poor sectors, which, to achieve the
right to education, would have to turn to public gifts from
the financial sector. In this area, a general recommendation
would be to seek answers less from the specific field of
education and more from an appropriate model of development
that does not limit the accomplishment of this right.
Social
participation in organized civil society is important;
participation that at some moments demands, pressures, and
controls, and in other moments supports and helps the public
to accomplish the right to
education.
The
central issue is the construction and accomplishment of
human rights, which has to foresee –
in the exercise of educational politics at all government levels – the
fortifying mechanisms of participation of the civil society at
work, through advice and other instruments of social control.
It is important to count on the mobilization of society
as an important factor for change and to count on the
guarantee that public politics can be implemented in
accordance with the interests of the majority.□
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