Quality of early childhood education in Brazil: Adaptation of MELQO

• In Event: Monitoring for quality improvement in early childhood care and education settings

Proposal

Early childhood education in Brazil, as in other parts of the world, is expanding rapidly. In 2001, 66.4% of children 4 and 5 years old attended pre-school, equivalent to 4.3 million children. Beginning in 2016, the Brazilian Federal Constitution mandates early childhood education for children 4 to 5 years old, and by 2017, 5.1 million children were attending pre-school, 77% in public facilities.
Early childhood education in Brazil has been a political priority and is clearly stated as a right of the Brazilian working class since the Federal Constitution of 1988. Early childhood education has gradually earned legal support for its implementation as part of the national educational system. Despite being a public policy priority with financial resources guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, there are no national evaluation tools that inform policy makers on the quality of early childhood education services, even when academic research shows that access to low quality early childhood education might have a negative effect on child development.
In 2018 the Brazilian Ministry of Education announced an evaluation that will focus on school inputs and will be based on data collected through questionnaires to be filled in by schools, incorporating early childhood education into the Basic Education Evaluation System. Nevertheless, measures of the quality of processes and of child development outcomes are not likely to be part of the evaluation announced, as the scope of the evaluation system is limited to data on inputs.
Fundação Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal’s (FMCSV) initiative takes place in this context. As a non-profit Brazilian organization investing in efforts to advance early childhood development, the foundation partnered with the University of São Paulo’s LEPES (Laboratory for Social Economics Studies and Research) and with the municipality of Boa Vista, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Roraima, to test MELQO tools’ adaptation possibilities to the Brazilian context. MELQO, or the Measuring Early Learning Quality & Outcomes initiative, provides open-source measures of child development and quality of learning environments that are intended to spur local adaptation and integration into monitoring systems.
The municipality of Boa Vista is a partner to FMCSV and has been supported by the foundation on a comprehensive set of projects that range from strategic intersectoral policy planning, monitoring and evaluation to ECE curriculum development and parenting projects, in order to advance early childhood development and create documented cases that can be scaled up and adopted by other municipal governments. In terms of the ECE evaluation project, by the end of 2018, the initiative’s tools will have been adapted to Boa Vista’s local conditions and tested in all of its 63 municipal pre-schools, observing two classes in each school and testing five children from each class observed. In early 2019, results from the study will be presented to the municipality to share learnings on the quality of the early childhood education services, and to build policy recommendations and contribute to the design of an early childhood education monitoring system. During 2018 new partnerships are being built with other municipal governments to expand MELQO’s testing field considering Brazilian diverse environments in order to make the contribution to the national early childhood education evaluation debate more robust.
The adaptation of the tool has faced many challenges. Among them is the fact that a national early childhood curriculum was built very recently, and local curricula are being discussed throughout the country. Even considering that both debates benefit from each other, local teams have offered resistance to the project until the curricula standards are complete. Building knowledge on the intertwining of both debates is expected.
It is hoped that the results of the project will contribute to further advance a national monitoring system not limited to inputs, but one that takes into consideration the quality of interactions and results in terms of early childhood development. Emphasis will be placed on defining the advantages and disadvantages of measuring quality and child development in the Brazilian context, and on the importance of understanding the political context for measurement when building and implementing measurement tools.

Authors

• Laura Ogando, University of Sao Paulo/ Ribeirao Preto

• Beatriz Abuchaim, Fundação Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal

• Daniel Domingues Santos, University of Sao Paulo

• Alejandra Meraz Velasco, Fundação Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal