Control of Educational Funding by the Brazilian Public Prosecutor's Office as a Mechanism for Ensuring the Right to Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Case studies of teachers in diverse contexts: integrating digital tools and competencies, and early career transitions

Proposal

Adequate public funding is a fundamental condition for ensuring the right to education. In Brazil, the Federal Constitution of 1988 establishes a minimum allocation of resources for education, and since 1996 the country has adopted a fund policy to redistribute resources among federative entities, aiming to reducing disparities in per-student spending.
The responsibility for providing education at the early childhood, elementary, and high school is held by the states and municipalities, but the federal government plays a redistributive and supplementary role to ensure equal educational opportunities and a minimum standard of quality.
Despite advancements in terms of state obligations and redistributive funding mechanisms, Brazil's per-student spending remains far below what is necessary to finance the quality of the right to education as proclaimed in the constitutional text and compared to OECD countries.
With the country's re-democratization in the late 1980s, there has been a strengthening of legal instruments and institutions to control public policies. In this process, the Public Prosecutor's Office has a central role, given the expansion of its regulatory functions in the educational field and the creation of a specialized structure for that purpose.
Research has shown that such institution established itself as an intermediary between the state and society. However, the literature also highlights that the rise in public policy control institutions has caused an adverse effect, such as administrative inertia, due to the fear of public managers being held unjustly accountable.
The research aimed to analyzing the role of this institution concerning educational funding, seeking to understand its actions in controlling public resources as a mechanism to enhance the conditions for ensuring the right to education.
The following question guided the investigation: How has the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office acted in the oversight of educational funding, from the development of its agenda to its strategies for action, and how has this process impacted the guarantee of the right to education?
The qualitative research analyzed documents available on the institution's official website and conducted interviews with the Public Prosecutor's Office actors.
Consequently, it was observed that the institution includes in its strategic plan a specific action against the misuse of public resources. During the study period, the institution suit in cases for controlling educational funding in the Superior Courts of Justice, questioning the federal government contributions from 1996 to 2005, which resulted in extra resources; and a lawsuit questioning the expenses for payment of retirees from education funding. It also established a Cooperation Agreement with the Ministry of Education to increase transparency in information regarding the correct application of resources. Recently, the "Public Prosecutor's Office for Education Project” was created, in partnership with the State Public Prosecutor's Offices, and aims to overseeing the right to quality education and the proper allocation of public funds.
Besides our institutional functions, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office's oversight of educational funding has focused on monitoring administrative acts related to the application of resources, with a lack of measures to address resource inequalities among federal entities and to ensure adequate funding.

Author

• Adriana Dragone Silveira, Sao Paulo University