Educational Inequalities in Brazil: A View on Teachers' Working Conditions

• In Event: Lessons from the Pandemic: International Perspectives Addressing Highlighted and Exacerbated Educational Inequalities

Abstract

The Covid 19 pandemic has put numerous inequalities in evidence in the world (ESTELLES and FISCHMAN, 2020). In Brazil, this scenario was also compounded with a context of fiscal austerity (BOSCHETTI and TEIXEIRA, 2019) and cultural conservatism that has greatly aggravated educational problems. It is undeniable that the main subject of educational inequalities is the student, but there is no consistent educational process without teachers. This article focuses on the analysis of the effect of the pandemic context on the working conditions of Brazilian teachers, considering the rupture of a cycle of teacher appreciation policies built from the 1988 Federal Constitution (GOUVEIA and FERRAZ, 2020) and sustained on the ideas of remuneration, career and training, which demanded action from decentralized education systems.

The urgency of valuing teachers through consistent policies of initial remuneration has extensive literature in Brazil (ALVES and SONOBE, 2018), as well as in the international debate (MORDUCHOWICZ, 2003; RAVITCH, 2013, GOLDSTEIN, 2014), but the pandemic highlighted other elements related to working conditions that were already a concern for researchers, such as layoffs risks, which was studied in the United States by UNDERWOOD (2018), for example; temporary contracts, recurrently problematized in the Brazilian case (CASSETARI et all, 2014; FELDMAN and COSTA, 2021), school turnover (SUTCHER, DARLING- HAMMOND, CARVER-THOMAR,2019, PEREIRA and OLIVEIRA, 2018), elements which, in the context of the pandemic have expanded and are related to new challenges. The change to the virtual space, regarding the contact with students, but, objectively, occupying teacher’s physical space at their homes, with their own equipment, and intensifying the working hours dedicated to the activities, initially represented a set of demands of new inequalities for workers. As the pandemic and vaccination advanced, the return to schools also showed inequalities of working conditions in the different education systems. In Brazil, it is not possible to understand this context without considering the local peculiarities of a decentralized federative system, in a context of economic crisis that has deepened the inequalities of financing conditions of education networks.

The article seeks to present an overview of these inequalities from the point of view of ongoing resistance. For this purpose, the documentary research focused on the action of the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE) in the construction of educational policies in Brazil. The empirical material used were the news reports that the national entity published in its portal in the period from March 2020 (when Brazil officially recognizes the pandemic) to August 2021. These news are specifically related to state and municipal union entities affiliated to the confederation, privileging the thematic analysis (LAPADAT, 2012) of local policies patterns viewed from the perspective union mobilizations built in this exceptional context in which the teaching work was organized.

Author

• Andrea Barbosa Gouveia, Federal University of Parana