How lack of funding is affecting public education in Brazil
Four girls from different geographical regions in Brazil talk about their experiences in the Brazilian public school system.
Four girls from different geographical regions in Brazil talk about their experiences in the public school system.
Growing up in the Conceição das Crioulas Quilombola Community, an Afro-Brazilian community that originated around the 17th century by people who escaped slave plantations (these people and their descendants are known as “quilombolas”) Iasmim Tayane was proud of having a quilombola-specific education. “Studying in other schools is not the same thing, because I’m there, but I do not know our story, our ancestors,” says Iasmim, whose mother is a teacher. “We are a community of strong tradition, and often this is not valued.”
To Iasmim, attending a quilombola public school represented progress for her community as before there were no schools at all within the area, and those who wished to complete their education needed to leave. However, she believes that a lot still needs to be done to ensure the school can provide students like her with a quality education. “Sometimes I feel a lack of having a library,” she says, referring to the absence of a library inside her school. “Our community has a library but it is not open because there are no books. We also do not have a gym. If we want to play sports, we go to some field or something.”
“Our community has a library but it is not open because there are no books. We also do not have a gym. If we want to play sports, we go to some field or something.”
Lack of infrastructure is just one of the problems that affect girls’ education in Brazil. Across the country, a significant resourcing gap between private and public schools makes it difficult for lower-income students to access and complete 12 years of quality education — especially in Black, quilombola and Indigenous communities where the effects of the Brazilian government’s historic negligence continue across generations. This underfunding of public education prevents students from learning the skills they need to complete university entrance exams in Brazil, exacerbating the higher education gap between students from private and public schools. In the top 10% of schools with the highest scores in ENEM (the National High School Exam used by many universities as an entrance requirement in Brazil), 18% are public and 82% are private.
The lack of science and computer labs, working libraries and gym equipment at Iasmim’s school is shared by most Brazilian public schools; a 2015 study found that only 4.5% of public schools have all the infrastructure items like energy, sanitation and laboratories that should be provided by law in the National Education Plan (PNE).
“Our community has a library but it is not open because there are no books. We also do not have a gym. If we want to play sports, we go to some field or something,” Iasmim shares. (Courtesy of Iasmim Tayane)
Evilyn Dias, a 16-year-old Indigenous student of the Kaimbé ethnicity in Bahia, a state in Northeastern Brazil, has felt the direct impact of the lack of resources on her education. “One of the things that I think should be in every school and is important for the mental health of students is art,” she shares. But in Evilyn’s school, no resources are allocated for art education, forcing students and teachers to improvise — often at their own expense. “The teachers who are willing to give us this type of work end up using their own salary, which is already little, to be able to buy the materials.” In Conceição das Crioulas, too, the lack of laboratories or computers designated for student use at Iasmim’s school places a disproportionate burden on her teachers. “If we need to do some kind of experiment, we do it in the regular classroom and improvise,” Iasmim explains. “Teachers always say that we can’t stop, we do with what we have, but there is a lack of proper equipment to do this.”
Amanda Arariba, a 16-year-old student from Pernambuco, loves everything about going to school — especially math class, where she says her teacher is kind and attentive when students ask for help. But after dropping out her sophomore year when her daughter was born, Amanda was unable to reenrol because the school had no space left. “The room was already full of students and would not fit more chairs for more students,” she explains.
“The teachers who are willing to give us this type of work end up using their own salary, which is already little, to be able to buy the materials,” Evilyn shares. (Courtesy of Evilyn Dias)
Next year, Amanda hopes she will be able to return to the classroom and continue her secondary education. But upon returning, she expects to find the same structural problems in her school that existed before she paused her studies. “The infrastructure is very bad,” Amanda says. “Everything is rusty, almost breaking, the air conditioners are dripping.” Because of this bad infrastructure, Amanda explains, lower-income students from her community have little incentive to make the difficult — and often expensive — trip to school in the mornings. “It would be good to have a school bus here in the region. Here the ticket is almost 10 reais and nobody wants to go to school because of that,” she says. “The school should also have a more reinforced lunch; just crackers with juice every day is not good.” Many of the problems Amanda points to worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic; for example, 47,2% of girls stopped receiving food at public school altogether, increasing their likelihood of dropping out.
The under-resourcing of public schools in Brazil has been going on for generations; Iasmim says that neither her mom nor her aunts had access to good infrastructure. As a result, she worries for future generations of quilombola students. “In quilombola schools, [education] is evolving but lacks these details that years and years pass and nothing changes,” she says. “So does that mean that even my children will not have this? A laboratory, a computer room?”
“It would be good to have a school bus here in the region. Here the ticket is almost 10 reais and nobody wants to go to school because of that,” Amanda shares. (Courtesy of Amanda Arariba)
On top of the infrastructure problem, most teachers in the Brazilian public school system consider themselves underpaid, with a minimum wage of R$ 2.886,24 (the equivalent to $569.91 under the current conversion rate) per month when the estimated cost of living for a single person is R$ 4,981. “In public schools, teachers are devalued — especially Indigenous people, in terms of salary and in terms of everything else,” says Evilyn. “When teachers see a prodigy, an intelligent student, and we joke ‘look at the future teacher,’ the teacher already says, ‘God forbid, with how bad it is.’”
With precarious contracts, lack of career advancement and wages that are disproportionate to level of training, teaching at a public school is not seen as an attractive career for educated people in Brazil. As a result, government-funded schools lack qualified candidates for teaching jobs, which negatively impacts students’ experiences in the classroom and discourages them from attending and completing school. “There’s a lack of teachers who like and love to teach, that interact with their students and treat them well despite everything,” says 17-year-old Francielly Costa, who studies in a public high school in Amazonas. For Francielly, addressing the funding gap between private and public education in Brazil is key to improving the quality of the country’s public school teachers. “Private schools have a better investment than public schools,” Francielly says. “The public education system can improve with more investments in serious, dedicated teachers who are really thinking about the students and not just themselves.”
“There’s a lack of teachers who like and love to teach, that interact with their students and treat them well despite everything,” Francielly shares. (Courtesy of Francielly Costa)
The effects of Brazil’s undervaluing of public school teachers are felt especially by marginalised students, who are less likely to see themselves represented among their teachers and, as a result, in their curriculums. Most public schools in Brazil don’t teach Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian history, favouring a Eurocentric curriculum that prevents students from learning about their own communities, as girls across the country reported in the #MeninasDecidem (#GirlsDecide) manifesto. Girls who studied in community-centric schools agree that having teachers on staff that Indigenous and quilombola students can identify with is important not only for its immediate positive impact on these students, but for the preservation and continuation of national history education in Brazil. “The fact that I grew up with this Indigenous education makes me have the knowledge I have today, makes me aware of the problems that Indigenous people have today,” Evilyn shares. “My quilombola education influenced a lot in my life because today the thought I have comes a lot from my teachers,” Iasmim agrees. “When they talk about my ancestors and those who lived in the community, they talk about how they didn’t even know they had the power to speak. Today we are the voices of those who could not speak.”
“The fact that I grew up with this Indigenous education makes me have the knowledge I have today, makes me aware of the problems that Indigenous people have today.”
The fight to increase the Brazilian state’s investment in its public schools has been underway for generations. And while progress has been slow, many girls are looking to Brazil’s upcoming elections as an opportunity to make their voices heard and hold leaders accountable for solving the problems in the public education system. “Although we are still young, I think we have a basis in many things to be able to go to vote this year,” says Francielly. “As we study, we learn many things that we did not see before and now we can contribute and collaborate with a better future for our country.”
In Brazil, voting for those over the age of 18 is mandatory, but those who are 16 and older are eligible to vote if they wish. In anticipation of the election, Malala Fund Education Champions in Brazil created a 40-point education commitment letter for candidates to sign. The document encourages Brazil's elected officials to take action towards a more robust public education system through measures like amplifying school resources and better salaries for teachers.
Like Francielly, Evilyn is already registered to vote, and she also made a video to influence other teenagers like herself to vote as part of Project Mandacaru Malala, which helps girls protect their right to education.
Iasmim, meanwhile, participated in the Malala Collective in the National Congress, where she was able to meet girls from all over the country and came to understand that the problem of negligence towards public education extended far beyond her community. “I saw that not only did this happen in the quilombos, but it also happened in the periphery as well,” she says. “This rejection of public schools happens in almost all schools.” For Iasmim, hope lies in young Brazilian women reaching across geographic and ethnic divides to fight, boldly, for their own right to education — and for one another’s. “The power of voting is revolutionary,” she says. “A lot of people say, ‘young people are the future.’ We are the future — and the now. If we want the future to be better, we have to change now. We have to make a revolution.”
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