World Bank pushes privatized distance learning in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

In the first week of June, Rossieli Soares, the secretary of education of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest industrial state, announced the purchase of millions of dollars of digital equipment for teachers, to be subsidized by the World Bank. This initiative follows the model developed by this agency of international financial capital—in partnership with billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as giant education companies—to put in place low-cost private education programs in Asia and Africa.

Persistently high student dropout rates were already widespread in schools throughout Brazil before the coronavirus pandemic. Exactly how millions of dollars’ worth of digital equipment, to be paid for by the workers themselves through cuts in education programs, wages and jobs, will bring impoverished students back to school—whether virtual or not—is left unexplained by Soares.

According to a survey by APEOESP, the São Paulo teachers union, using reports sent by teachers, an average of only 25 percent of students are participating in online classes. According to the state government’s own data, only 47 percent of students had access to the distance learning app created during the pandemic for state schools.

Rio Grande do Sul teachers protesting over delayed wages and working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic (Credit: CPERS)

Moreover, while this policy is carried out, education officials in both the government and the private sector are warning that the social and economic impact of the pandemic will provoke an enormous increase in student drop-out rates. In 2014, a survey of 271 institutions by the Brazilian Distance Learning Association (Abed) found that, among the obstacles to adequate learning, “student evasion” was the most cited, with 116 institutions declaring it as the biggest impediment. The main reason for the dropouts was the lack of time for students who had to work.

A 2018 study by the education NGO Todos pela Educação found that 36.5 percent of all 19-year-olds in Brazil had not finished high school, a percentage that corresponds to 1.2 million young people, indicating widespread financial pressures that force youth out of education.

The fact that the pandemic intensified pressures on poor students to miss classes or abandon school completely in order to help with household expenses is ignored by the government, as well as the education NGOs and private education companies.

The World Bank loan to subsidize the acquisition of thousands of tablets and computers by teachers was promoted as a way to “facilitate their work.” Under conditions of increased financial hardship and mass unemployment, the loan, to be paid for by the workers themselves, is designed to introduce new obligations on the digital platforms for an already overwhelmed and ever-poorer workforce.

Such platforms will be made tools not for better teaching, but to widen performance evaluations, which will be implemented through mass measurable criteria. These criteria are designed by the same private sector organizations that have been campaigning with high-level government education officials and representatives of international financial interests for more distance learning platforms and large-scale exams.

Amazonas, Brazil’s largest state, was used as a model for distance learning. Having its entire territory located inside the Amazon rainforest, the state started its program in 2007 due to difficult access to thousands of isolated riverside and indigenous communities. São Paulo’s current secretary of education, Soares, was Amazonas’ secretary of education during two administrations, and was later appointed as secretary of basic education in the federal government, playing a key role in the national pro-market high school reform approved in 2017. In 2018, he became minister of education during President Michel Temer’s acceleration of the austerity measures which had been initiated under the Workers Party (PT) government of Dilma Rousseff.

In the beginning of April, João Doria, the ultra-right governor of São Paulo, who has been promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic as a champion of science and reason against Brazil’s fascistic president, Jair Bolsonaro, and commended by PT former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, announced cynically: “So that no student is excluded, the four major telecommunications companies—Claro, Vivo, Oi and Tim—reached a deal with the government providing free internet access.”

Similar deals were reached in the Federal District and the state of Paraná. The distance learning platform developed by the São Paulo Education Secretary (Seduc), expected to be used by a million high school students, is based on the Amazon Web Services (AWB) cloud, which, according to the state government, is being provided “at no cost.”

The real meaning of these deals is shown by Doria’s record of intense cuts and privatizations along with the simultaneous contribution of hundreds of millions in donations from big business during his brief one-year mandate as mayor of São Paulo’s capital in 2017. In the first three months of his administration, Doria announced 255 million reais (US$81.5 million) in donations, including 15 million reais (US$4.8 million) from Microsoft toward access to its online education platforms and training for teachers. Later he would announce the use of only 18 percent of the city’s annual budget for investments, the lowest in 10 years, having used a mere 7.5 percent by July.

Both the high rate of school dropouts and its social causes have been seen for years as an opportunity to place students in a lucrative market of private schools for low-income families and, more recently, the market of distance learning and “gamified” learning.

A study published in 2009 by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation’s Center of Social Policies (CPS), in partnership with the NGOs Educar Dpaschoal Foundation, Todos pela Educação and the Unibanco Institute, declared that among the main reasons for school dropouts were “restrictions on income and [access to] the credit market which prevent people from exploring the high payback provided by education in the long term.”

The study offers as a solution “providing education credit, awarding of scholarships or the transfer of conditioned income.” In other words, student dropouts are to be exploited as a lucrative market through exploiting the calamitous state of public education and offering a supposedly better quality education in the private sector. During the last decade, these efforts assumed the form of propping up distance learning and “technology-based learning,” and took a significant step forward with the approval of the high school reform of 2017.