New High School public consultation being evaluated by University of São Paulo Chair
MEC wants to hear the population about the implementation of the New Secondary School in a public consultation on the Participa Mais Brasil platform and in an agenda that runs until June 6 and features webinars and seminars with specialists in the reform, exclusive questionnaires for students, teachers and school directors and the general public, with a sample from across the country, in addition to meetings with groups of representatives of the student movement and public hearings in the five regions of Brazil.
The reform cannot stop completely while some loose edges are resolved, says sociologist and master in Political Science Maria Helena Guimarães Castro, professor of the Ayrton Senna Institute Chair of Innovation in Educational Evaluation at the USP Institute of Advanced Studies – Polo Ribeirao Preto . She says she is in favor of dialogue and that the reform is welcome, since the performance indicators of Brazilian education have been negative for a long time.
“The Ayrton Senna Institute is in favor of reform and also in favor of improvement, since there are many demands that come from state and federal public schools with regard to the design of training itineraries that make up the flexible part of the curriculum”, says the professor .
Maria Helena Guimarães Castro – Photo: USP Archives
The New Secondary School – which intends to increase the student’s minimum workload and make the curriculum more dynamic, offering training itineraries – has been implemented in Brazil since February 2022, generating discussions about the infrastructure of most schools in offering the new training itineraries. For Maria Helena, monitoring and permanent improvement of all educational policies is fundamental, but a reform that is being implemented cannot be interrupted in the middle of the school year.
“The implementation of the New Secondary School was greatly hampered by the relative absence of the MEC, especially in 2019, 2020. At the end of 2021, there was an improvement in the MEC team, which became more attentive, but what should have been done by the MEC and the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) was not done. Inep did not define, for example, the design of the National High School Examination (Enem), which was a very important point for implementation”, says Maria Helena.
According to the professor, it is necessary to be careful with the adjustments that will be made without losing sight of the fact that, behind the New Secondary School and the curricular proposals of the States, there are families, teachers who are working, students who are studying and who need to finish second year of high school and prepare for third year.
Inequality in education
A sensitive point raised by specialists and student movements is that the New Secondary School can contribute to the increase in social inequality in teaching, since most public schools do not have the necessary infrastructure to offer the new training itineraries. A simple issue is the lack of rooms to offer different disciplines to two classes of the same school year at the same time.
For Maria Helena, inequality in access to universities was already high even before the reform, being mitigated by the law of quotas and projects that public universities, including USP, make with the government of the State of São Paulo. However, in Brazil, the maxim that the student leaves high school and enters university is not true, according to the sociologist, only 22% of high school graduates, aged 18 to 24, go on to higher education.
In the 2021 Enem – which gave the right to compete for vacancies in universities in the year 2022, in the existing format since 2009 -, only 40% of high school graduates signed up to take the test. This indicates, according to Maria Helena, that the other 60% did not enroll in the test because they did not believe they were prepared due to the low quality of Brazilian education, thus reinforcing the New High School project, which, according to her, offers the necessary advances for the improvement of education.
For Maria Helena, the main advancement of the new project are the alternatives for these students to already have a professional technical training that will prepare them for the world of work without preventing them from continuing in higher education in the future.
“Until now, students were required to finish high school and then attend professional technical education lasting one year or a year and a half in general. Another possibility was for the student to go to vocational technical education integrated into high school, that is, he would need to attend regular high school in the morning and in the afternoon or evening, concomitantly, professional technical education, and this is the main cause of the dropout rate nocturnal professional technical education, including at Centro Paula Souza, which is free”, concludes Maria Helena.