O Programa Novo Mais Educação: uma avaliação política da Política

Abstract

This thesis deals with the Novo Mais Educação Program (PNME), developed and implemented by the Ministry of Education during Michel Temer’s government, starting in 2016. The PNME replaces the Mais Educação Program, instituted by the Federal Government since 2007, and emerges in the context of a parliamentary coup that promoted the institutional rupture of the winning political project of the 2014 presidential elections. This work aims to carry out a political evaluation of the PNME, aiming to unveil the political and ideological meaning of the new program, to capture what is new in its proposal. Through a political evaluation of the policy, there was a confrontation of the meanings that education, generally, and integral education, particularly, take up in Brazil and the conformation of this conceptual field and its practice. This was intended to identify the guiding conceptions that conducted the plan’s formulators and the political and ideological forces that sustained the Novo Mais Educação proposal. Within the framework of its institutional engineering, we seek to identify the power of the program in terms of objectives, organization, and resources, to meet the announced goals. The evaluative research developed, in the form of political evaluation of the policy, used techniques and procedures related to bibliographic research, secondary data analysis, documentary research, and empirical research. The main findings are revealing of the change of direction and orientation that PNME promotes in relation to the Mais Educação Program. By focusing on instrumental education, as opposed to a conception of integral education for human formation, the Novo Mais Educação Program incorporates all the elements present in the discourses of the neoliberal agenda and adopts all the initiatives that converge towards this ideology. Working in national and international partnerships, the PNME redirects the extension of the school day for the pedagogical reinforcement in Portuguese Language and Mathematics, aiming at meeting the goals of Basic Education Development Index (Ideb). Regarding its organization, the program is marked by improvisation, which is determined both by the necessity to create something to discontinue the Mais Educação Program and its inconsistencies presented, the latter in relation to the problem situation that it aims to intervene upon. Starting from a peculiar and partial reading of reality, which would already demonstrate a limitation for the achievement of results, the program enjoys of limited means, such as financial resources and institutional support, and it organizes itself through strategies that privilege the orders from top to bottom, confronting the autonomy of students, teachers, and schools. For the carried-out review, the conceptual discussion has been supported in the categories of education, integral education, human training, and human capital theory. Confronted by emancipatory ideals and theories of integral education towards citizenship, critical, and conscious formation, the Novo Mais Educação Program could be considered a retrocession, once it promotes decontextualized education, of training and its primary focus on meeting the indexes foreseen on large-scale assessments.