Opinion – Pablo Acosta: It is necessary to act now to recover the losses in education with Covid

Brazilian education suffers from the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, which increased school dropout and hampered recent advances in improving learning, especially in poorer municipalities. The impacts increase inequality in children’s learning, mainly due to the lack of connectivity between schools and families to guarantee quality blended learning. A study showed that in São Paulo, students learned less than a third with non-face-to-face education, compared with the face-to-face model. It was also estimated a 365% increase in the risk of dropping out of school due to low access to distance education. Financial and technical cooperation between the three levels of Brazil’s education system is very important to direct education policies to recover from learning loss and promote efficiency in public spending.

Constitutional Amendment (EC) No. 108/2020 that was passed during the pandemic is a great opportunity to strengthen cooperation between levels of government and respond more effectively to the impact of Covid-19 on education. The reform brought by the EC restructured Fundeb’s distributive mechanisms, which seek to equalize per capita financing among Brazilian states and municipalities, and created results-based transfer mechanisms with the objective of promoting efficiency in spending and improving quality with equity. in Brazilian basic education. The most important transfer mechanism will redistribute resources from the main state consumption tax (ICMS) to the municipalities that manage elementary schools. A minimum of 10% of resources will be transferred based on increased learning outcomes and equity, considering the socio-economic level of students. On the other hand, the share of resources related to fiscal added value, which benefits richer municipalities, may be reduced by up to 10 percentage points.

The constitutional change was inspired by the case of the state of Ceará in 2007, which conditioned the distribution of 18% of ICMS destined to municipalities to improve the results of education, especially learning. Another 7% were conditioned to the improvement of health and environment indicators.

By August 2022, all states will have to incorporate results-based funding, but so far only five states (Amapá, Ceará, Pernambuco, Piauí and Sergipe) have adjusted their laws to the constitutional change and three states have yet to raise the percentage for the minimum of 10% from 2023 (Acre, Alagoas and Espírito Santos). For this, the first step is to support the other 18 states to regulate their incentive mechanisms to induce municipalities to seek solutions to face local challenges and focus efforts on actions with greater potential to recover the learning loss due to Covid-19. Several educational partner institutions are providing this support to the states, but they face resistance related to changing the mentality and behavior of state and municipal managers.

The proposal of these institutions, based mainly on the successful experience of Ceará, consists of an incentive mechanism that recognizes and rewards the municipalities that advance in the learning indicators in their school networks, especially for the most vulnerable students. Evidence from Ceará’s experience shows that the combination of its ICMS incentive mechanism and technical cooperation can produce even faster improvements in learning indicators. The impacts of the incentive mechanism are amplified by the technical cooperation strategy and vice versa, as shown in a recent study by the World Bank. Cooperation allows the state to provide technical assistance to the poorest and least capable municipalities, and helps to level the playing field in the competition for resources. Cooperation with the federal government after joining the Covid-19 response program — the Brasil na Escola program, created in March 2021 — will be another good opportunity for municipalities to recover from learning losses and accelerate improvements in the quality of education. .

The second step is to defend this mechanism with the municipalities, mainly convincing the richest municipalities, which will possibly lose resources with the reduction of the fiscal added value criterion. Although a gain for the entire state is expected in the improvement of educational indicators, in the short term the mayors of the most impacted cities will have to adapt to the decrease in resources and absorb the reduction in revenues using resources from other sources. The increase in collections for the vast majority of municipalities in Brazil, due to the resumption of economic activity in 2021, seems to have created a unique opportunity to implement difficult changes that aim to benefit the population as a whole.

Finally, despite 2022 being an election year, this reform is a great opportunity to help recover from the learning loss due to the pandemic, which should be a non-partisan agenda. A delay in implementing the reform will not only delay the effects of apprenticeship recovery programs, but could also lead to disputes in the Supreme Court due to non-compliance with the EC. It is true that every redistribution of resources produces winners and losers. But the benefit of providing quality education to the majority of the population, providing better opportunities and growth in the future, must be the driving force behind the performance of public agents in the present.

This column was written in collaboration with my World Bank colleagues Marcelo Barbosa, Senior Consultant in Education, and Leandro Costa, Senior Economist