I Take a Class

On Sunday, I took my first class in a pós-graduação (1- or 2-year "specialist" degree program) on management, which includes a good amount of content related to education, since the coordinator/professor was previously a teacher and the secretary of education of the small city of Capim Grosso, four hours north of Salvador. After each class, I plan to share whatever interesting tidbits related to education and development that come up.

From the inaugural class, the most jarring fact was that students in many of Capim Grosso's lower-quality municipal schools typically spend only 2.5 hours actually in class. Now, almost every school in Brazil has relatively little class time, since students go only in the morning or the afternoon (or at night, if you are one of the many working adults that still hasn't finished). But hypothetically, class goes from something like 7:30-12, with a short recess. The reality? Teachers show up after eight o'clock and often don't truly start class until around 8:30. The supposedly 15-minute recess goes on for at least 30 minutes (schools don't use strict bell systems like in the US, so students seem to go back to class more or less when they feel like it). And by the time 11:30 rolls around, there isn't a single teacher still in the classroom. And you can bet that a good portion of those 2.5 hours actually in the classroom are wasted too, depending on the quality of the individual teacher.

Something which I had already known, but was also highlighted in the class: in Brazil, the school principals are political appointees. When a new mayor is elected, or an old mayor is removed due to corruption and a new one enters, the new politician is obligated to hand out jobs to all his supporters that got him there. As a result, the secretary of education is purged and the schools all undergo immediate change in directorship. Practically, this means both that the directors do not necessarily have any compelling technical reason to have the job (such as a skill of any type), and that tumultuous changes in schools that hurt teaching and reduce class time are frequent. Not only is the change frequent, but most politicians consider it obligatory to scupper everything the previous administration did, such as long-term educational planning. The result? Any real planning process is a waste of time. It takes a very long time, perhaps years, to formulate a competent plan for a municipal educational system with full feedback from teachers and the community. By the time you can start putting the plan into practice, the government will probably have changed. In the 12-year school career of one student, there is a good chance that three or more attempts to put a plan into place will come up, but none will achieve a lasting impact.