TCU: four in ten teachers have inadequate training

A portrait of the precariousness of Brazilian education, four out of every ten basic education teachers in the public network have inadequate training. The conclusion is part of the report by the Federal Audit Court (TCU), when analyzing three teacher training projects created by the Ministry of Education, with a view to achieving the goal of training all of the country's teaching staff by 2024.

This objective was the most relevant (goal number 15) of the ministry's ten-year planning, announced in 2014 and entitled “20 goals of the National Health Plan”. Education”, with a view to ensuring that professionals would, next year, have a higher education profile compatible with their respective areas of knowledge.

In contrast, practically ten years ago, the recurring reality was that teachers did not have specific training for subjects they taught, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, among others.

Since then, this precarious situation has changed little. After a detailed examination of the aforementioned 'goal 15', the TCU concluded, at the end of last July, that, on average, 37.4% of teachers have incomplete or inadequate training for the functions they perform in the teaching.

Not even as a consolation – Although it is no consolation, the situation was even worse in 2013, when 49.5% of educators were not properly trained. In a note, the Court of Auditors emphasizes that “despite the growth, these percentages are far behind the target [for 2024] of 100% [of graduates] in all stages of basic education”.

The MEC, in turn, claims, in a note, to have created a “working group tasked with proposing policies to improve initial training for teachers”, in addition to highlighting the increase, to 90 thousand and 100 thousand, the number of scholarships for starting teaching in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Another argument raised by the ministry is its commitment to building “a national policy of literacy, which would include continuing education programs to be offered by states and counties"

Analysis of three projects – The TCU, in turn, analyzed the three teacher training projects created by the Union, in order to achieve the aforementioned goal. The first of them, Pril (Institutional Program for Promoting and Inducing Innovation in Initial Continuing Training of Teachers and Directors), would aim to ensure ‘innovative improvement’ to the curricula of teachers already formed. Due to the rejection of universities, even if the lure is to finance courses for educational institutions superior, Pril resulted in ‘low adherence’, under the argument that this program “would contravene the autonomy of the university".

The second project, entitled Parfor (National Plan for Training Teachers in Basic Education) would have as its mission the offering of degree courses in the area of ​​teachers' work. Despite the fact that the budget for this program has plummeted by 65% ​​in the period from 2019 to 2021, Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) notes that the increase The turnover of temporary teachers “makes monitoring the program unfeasible”, due to the ease for these professionals, once enrolled, to abandon teaching within the year Following. As if these arguments were not enough, the education departments would not provide logistical and financial support to guarantee the permanence of teachers on Parfor courses.

The third and final project, the Open University System of Brazil (UAB) – aimed at the licensing and improvement of distance educators – was hit hard for a budget cut that reached 28% between 2019 and 2021, despite its mission to ‘expand and internalize the supply of higher education course resources in the country’.

No ability to articulate – To complete the crisis, the sector lost its capacity to articulate, after former president Jair Bolsonaro abolished the Secretariat for Articulation with Education Systems (Sase), until then, in charge of articulating the National Education Plan (PNE), in favor of greater interaction between state and municipal education departments with universities. “There was a network that helped states and municipalities in implementing integrated policies, but the MEC preferred to execute specific projects, like civic-military schools, said the president of Undime (Union of Municipal Education Directors), Luiz Miguel Martins Garcia.