Dilemmas at the Top – Insights from the Brazilian Federal Ministry of Education in implementing recent policy priorities in Secondary Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: How It Works: Mapping Implementation Dynamics from a Public Administration Perspective in Resource-Constrained Education Contexts

Proposal

The public policy cycle - based on different steps from the articulation of the problem to the achievement of the goals- is not composed of rigid, disconnected phases. Decision-making agendas often respond to urgent demands or prioritize the target audience, thereby influencing the rigidity of certain constitutive elements within the policy. Similarly, these elements may or may not be adaptable to different contexts, even when designed to achieve common goals across diverse realities.
Implementation dilemmas are closely intertwined with the dilemmas of discretion and how these are addressed during the formulation and design of public policies. In Brazil, a country of continental dimensions, the education system operates under a federalist structure, which requires collaboration between different levels of government. This adds the variable of intergovernmental coordination to the challenges of policy implementation. While policies are defined at the federal level, their execution relies on state and municipal governments, which are primarily responsible for providing a universal, mandatory, and quality education. Indeed, the assumed rules of a policy’s logical framework—those that define the procedural steps for its execution—can be ambiguous, conflicting, overlapping, or even nonexistent (Lipsky, 2010;).
This presentation will explore and compare decision-making agendas and policy designs at the Federal level that allow for varying degrees of discretion among the managers responsible for implementation.
The focus here is on the differences between two major education policies of the Ministry of Education in recent years, both of which have been central to the Ministry’s agenda since the onset of the third Lula administration: the revision of the New High School Reform, passed in 2017, and the program to reduce high school dropout rates, known as Pé-de-Meia, approved by Congress in 2023.
While both policies share overarching goals—such as reducing dropout rates and increasing the number of high school graduates—they are built on markedly different assumptions and incentive structures. The New High School Reform was grounded in discussions about the pedagogical foundations of secondary education: curriculum revisions, increased instructional hours, and offering students more flexibility in their curricular choices. In contrast, the Pé-de-Meia program is centered on providing conditional financial incentives to students, where the incentive is tied to fulfilling basic requirements such as school attendance and academic performance.
The implementation of these policies faces distinct challenges. Some stem from the nature of the interventions themselves, while others are linked to choices made during the formulation phase. This presentation will examine the elements of policy design that could have been adjusted to better accommodate the realities of implementation, particularly in ways that expand the discretion of local policymakers while still adhering to the overarching policy objectives (Lotta & Pires, 2023).

Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (30th Anniversary Expanded ed.). Russell Sage Foundation.
Lotta, G., & Pires, R. (2023). Public Policy Implementation in a context of extreme inequality: Between universalist ambitions and practical selectivity. In The Brazilian Way of Doing Public Administration: Brazil with an‘s’ (pp. 219-231). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Author

• Tassiana Cunha Carvalho, Ministery of Education