Few issues enjoy such widespread consensus in Brazil as the need to improve education. Debates about what course of action the country should take in order to enhance student education and development are long-standing and diverse, but regardless of what plan is laid out, Brazilian education won't make any progress unless it makes substantial investments in a key player: the teacher. The past decade has seen a decline in the number of teachers in basic level education across different regions of the country.
But this isn't necessarily due to a lack of available openings in licentiate degree programs, designed to train teachers for work in basic level education, nor has there been a decrease in demand for school teachers. In fact, studies show that Brazil is currently facing a shortage of teachers due to a lack of interest in pursuing the profession. In 2021, for instance, the state of Maranhão only filled 7% of the positions for art teachers in middle school.
In Pernambuco, over 60% of high school students are taught Physics by non-specialized teachers. And in Tocantins, only 5% of the Sociology seats available have been filled. So where have all the Brazilian teachers gone?
Teachers encounter several crossroads and hurdles in their journey to the classroom. In their transition from aspiring teacher to practicing professional, students must choose the paths they'll take and what kind of career they want. And the road that leads to the doors of Brazilian schools is long and winding.
Bottlenecks in the teacher training process begin with the student's choice of whether or not to pursue a teaching career. INEP's Higher Education Census shows that only 15% of roughly 4 million people who enrolled in undergraduate courses in 2021 opted for licentiate degree programs. The second crossroads in our journey to the classroom is found in the licentiate program itself.
Even among students who have chosen the path that leads to their becoming teachers, we see a drop-out rate of over 50% after enrollment in all curricular areas. So, if we take the good students who might complete the program and who could go on to become good teachers – they're lured away by other sectors of the job market. So, if we take a student who completes a math licentiate degree program: he may go on to teach mathematics, but he'll come face to face with reality: 40 classes a week; wages that are much lower than what he'd imagined he'd need to get by; poor working conditions in some schools.
. . So when a civil service position opens up, at Caixa Econômica, a federal bank, for instance: the wages are often twice what he makes as a teacher; his career will have a beginning, a middle and an end, and, supposedly, it's more stable, and there's progress to be made, so he'll choose that over teaching.
Among those who complete the program, only a third actually work as teachers in Brazil. In 2019, for instance, the average income of teachers who hold an undergraduate degree and teach at public schools at the basic education level only came up to 78% of the income earned by other professionals with the same level of education. The reality of the pay gap was shown in a OECD study, published in 2021.
Brazil's wage floor for elementary and middle school teachers is the lowest out of 40 countries. The teacher shortage is one of the main repercussions of the crisis in the Brazilian licentiate degree programs for teachers. Out of the 2.
8 million available licentiate program openings in 2021, only 300 thousand were filled, leaving 2. 5 million enrollment vacancies unfilled. The shortage of teachers has led schools around the country to assign professionals to teach subjects in which they weren't trained.
for lack of specialized candidates Improvisation tends to negatively affect students' learning, because classes tend to focus on academic formalism, and lack direct relevance to the students' real-life experiences. Moreover, the dearth of professionals is exacerbated by the outdated curricula used in licentiate degree programs, which often lack any kind of integration with other disciplines, and disregard the students' real-world context. The secondary school Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC), ratified in 2018, states that classes should no longer be restricted to traditional disciplines.
Instead classes should take a cross-disciplinary approach to different areas of knowledge. So a Physics class, for instance, should be integrated into the broader field of natural science, and should cover certain concepts of Chemistry and Biology. The problem, however, is that the licentiate degree programs' outdated curricula means that a countless teachers complete their degree without having been adequately trained to deal with the new reality faced by teachers.
The results of the evaluation published in December 2023 by PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, reveals an even more alarming scenario. The results of PISA's evaluation, which were recently published, show that our primary and secondary school curricula do not provide students with the necessary tools to tackle complex tasks set down by PISA TIMSS and PIRLS. And no matter how well-intentioned the teachers may be – and there are countless well-intentioned teachers – they still lack the basic training to tackle these complex tasks, to teach them to students.
We've seen the results, and we're deeply saddened by them, but the data fails to find its way into actual teaching practices and training. And what's more, this group, this generation, will go on to become teachers, and they'll join the licentiate programs with significant information gaps, meaning the following generation will have an even larger information gap. In other words, people who choose to join a licentiate program will already have significant learning gaps stemming from inadequate middle and high school education.
The disparities between the content of teacher training programs and the new educational demands in Brazil are a cause for concern among researchers in the field. There's been growing concern that the disparity between education and current educational guidelines may negatively affect student development, potentially leading to higher drop-out rates. Moreover, it has the potential to discourage students from pursuing licentiate degrees in specific areas of knowledge, jeopardizing the education of future generations, who'll continue to face a shortage of qualified teachers.
Licentiate degree programs must undergo an overhaul in order to offer solid education in both specific areas of knowledge and in training students to teach. In addition, there's still a lot to be done regarding teachers. The National Education Plan, which determines the guidelines, goals and strategies for education policies in Brazil is currently under review.
Serious consideration should be given to the incorporation o of initiatives that render the teaching profession more attractive. It is also crucial to implement effective strategies to entice educators to work in basic education.
