Brazilian National Education Plan 2025-2035: The relationship between funding and national policy for High School

ABSTRACT

This article discusses public education funding as a prerequisite for implementing a national high school policy that addresses the needs and aspirations of Brazilian youth. This study employs a theoretical-bibliographical approach, utilizing legal texts and documents. Content analysis (Bardin, 2016) is used to interpret and refine the information gathered, creating a comprehensive data corpus. The study concludes the following: i) The Brazilian high school reform is influenced by international organizations that shape youth training policies despite facing challenges in its implementation; ii) The final document prepared by the Brazilian National Education Forum (FNE) and submitted to the Ministry of Education for the preparation of the ordinance suggests that Goal 20 of the current Brazilian National Education Plan (PNE) and its related strategies are likely to be included into the forthcoming PNE for 2025-2035; iii) According to the CONAE 2024, there is a reiterated need to increase the percentage of GDP allocated to education; iv) It is crucial that the civil society organizes itself and advocate the decisions made at CONAE 2024; v) Without robust planning and sustainable public funding, policies focused on high school education will be unattainable

Keywords:
Education; High School; Educational Funding; Brazilian National Education Plan; Educational Policies

RESUMO

O objetivo deste artigo é discutir o financiamento em educação pública como condição para implementar uma política nacional de Ensino Médio que atenda às necessidades e aos anseios das juventudes brasileiras. Trata-se de estudo de cunho teórico-bibliográfico realizado com base em textos legais e documentos. Para interpretar e refinar as informações dos documentos e a constituição do corpus de dados adotou-se a Análise de Conteúdo (Bardin, 2016). Concluiu-se que: i) a reforma do Ensino Médio segue orientação de organismos internacionais que influenciam políticas de formação das juventudes, a despeito de resistências à sua implementação; ii) a meta 20 do atual PNE e suas estratégias tendem a ser retomadas no PNE 2025-2035, conforme texto final elaborado pelo Fórum Nacional de Educação (FNE) e enviado ao Ministério da Educação para subsidiar a elaboração do Projeto de Lei; iii) a CONAE 2024 reafirma a necessária ampliação do percentual do PIB aplicado em educação; iv) é fundamental que a sociedade civil se organize para defender as bases do texto aprovado na CONAE 2024; v) sem um planejamento robusto e financiamento público, as políticas voltadas ao Ensino Médio serão inviabilizadas.

Palavras-chave:
Educação; Ensino Médio; Financiamento da Educação; Plano Nacional de Educação; Políticas Educacionais

Introduction

Following the legal-media and parliamentary coup that removed Dilma Rousseff¹ from the position of President of the Republic on August 31, 2016, the political-economic situation established in Brazil paved the way for the dismantling of public policies in social areas, and public education was one of the most affected. Among the actions adopted for dismantling, we can mention Constitutional Amendment (EC) No. 95/2016 (Brasil, 2016a), which instituted a new fiscal regime and froze the Federal Government’s primary expenses for 20 years.

In the educational area, EC 95/2016² (Brasil, 2016a), annulled the mandatory constitutional requirement to apply at least 18% of the Federal Government tax revenue to the maintenance and development of education. In addition to the direct and immediate impact on higher education, in the medium and long term, the Amendment also affected basic education with: i) reduction of the Federal Government’s supplementary role with subnational entities; ii) enabling the increase of the share of Federal Government from the total resources of the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and the Appreciation of Professionals in Education (FUNDEB); iii) inducing subnational governments to adopt the Amendment’s fiscal methodology, which would be legitimized at the federal level; iv) reducing the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allotted to public education; v) delay in implementing the Student-Quality Cost (CAQ). It occurred two years after the Brazilian National Education Plan (PNE) 2014-2024 (Brasil, 2015a), at a crucial moment for its implementation. As Saviani (2014, p. 80-81) warns, warns, a plan without guaranteed financial resources “is a mere letter of intent whose goals can never be achieved.”

This text focuses on High School, historically marked by the polarization of the purposes of continuing studies in higher education and preparing for the world of work, a relevant aspect for the proposed discussion, considering that the current reform of high school education approved by Law 13.415/2017 (Brasil, 2017b) is basically curricular.

Furthermore, the “new” High School further weakens the education of young people from the lower classes (working class, rural workers, small landowners, etc.), historically exploited by the hegemonic segments. Therefore, in the fight against the bourgeois order, critical and integral training, the acquisition of political and philosophical autonomy, and the raising of class consciousness are essential for arousing the spirit of division (Gramsci, 2001) and the dawn of a just society.

The number of students can also measure the size of the high school challenge. According to the School Census (Brasil, 2024a), in 2023, 47.3 million enrollments were registered in 178.5 thousand basic education schools in Brazil, 37,881,305 of which were in public institutions. This contingent represents a seductive and profitable audience for private educational groups, “companies that see Brazilian education as an expanding market and promote the idea of the quality of their services” (Souza and Moreira, 2020, p. 421). These groups, using the argument of improving the quality of education, profit by offering products for Brazilian public education, such as the sale of pedagogical packages, teacher training, textbooks, and technologies (Adrião, 2017). And they still instill in the young individuality, entrepreneurship, competition, and other values typical of the capitalist market.

The arguments used by Michel Temer’s government (2016-2018) to reform the High School focus on historical problems at this stage, such as access and permanence, failure, age/grade gap, dropout, exclusion, and poor performance of Brazilian students in standardized tests. As a solution, a curricular reform is proposed through the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base for High School (BNCCEM) (Brasil, 2017a), guided by the pedagogy of competencies that presupposes the development of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that meet the demands of everyday life and the world of work.

In this direction, in 2016, Provisional Measure No. 746/2016 (Brasil, 2016b) was approved, which was converted into Law No. 13.415/2017 (Brasil, 2017b). With this legal support, the Ministry of Education (MEC) launched an announcement encouraging States to join the reform of High School, including two programs:

• a) the Program to Promote the Implementation of Full-Time High Schools (PROEMTI), aiming to ensure the provision of school activities for at least seven hours a day (Art. 13),

• b) the New High School Support Program (PRONEM), established by MEC Ordinance No. 649 on July 10, 2018 (Brasil, 2018).

With the adhesion to PRONEM, as established by Law No. 13.415/2017, the minimum workload of secondary education must be up to 800 hours, distributed in at least 200 annual days of effective schoolwork (Brasil, 2017b, Art. 24, Clause I), being extended to 1,400 hours per year in five years starting in March 2017. The limit for basic general training is up to 1,800 hours (Brasil, 2017b, Art. 35, par. 5), which will represent 43 to 60% of the total expected workload of 3,000 hours, which may reach up to 4,200 hours to be achieved in 2022 (Brasil, 2017b, Art. 24, Clause I, par. 1), with the excess workload allocated to preparatory education being directed towards professional training. This format prioritizes the flexible part of the curriculum to the detriment of general education, demonstrating a utilitarian instructional logic in the reform of High School (Pacheco, 2022, p. 194-195).

Thus, the reduction of the common core of the curriculum restricts access to knowledge and the cultural heritage historically constructed by humanity, which can have repercussions on the humanistic and critical education of young people from a perspective of civic and autonomous education. The flexibility of the curriculum causes a double division, as it reinforces the opposition between preparatory and professional education, crystallizing both the fragmentation of intellectual training and its opposition to manual training, which deepens the dual education that allows the children of the ruling classes to acquire knowledge for the exercise of command, elaboration and planning functions in the production process and the State. Children from the lower classes are directed towards a pragmatic education that prioritizes the performance of practical and subordinate activities. Therefore, through education, the political superstructure reproduces the social relations in the economic structure (Pacheco, 2022).

The political superstructure is understood based on the conceptualization of Marx and Engels (2008), who use the metaphor of the building to analyze the economic base and the political/legal superstructure of the society hegemonized by the bourgeoisie. In the preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx; Engels, 2008, p. 49), these German thinkers state that men involuntarily relate to each other to satisfy their needs for existence, in a process in which such relationships are analogous to the evolution of their productive forces. In this way, the economic structure of society corresponds to the fullness of production relations that are equivalent to the material base of society and has above it the State that constitutes the political, legal, and cultural superstructure and expresses the consciousness arising from existing social forms. Therefore, the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual aspects in a process in which the social being of men determines their consciousness and not the consciousness that determines their being.

Given these initial elements, this article situates the tensions and resistance generated by the reform of the New High School in a scenario that should have been marked by the implementation of Goals 3 and 20 of the PNE 2014-2024, with the objective of discussing financing in public education as a condition for implementing a national High School policy that meets the needs and desires of Brazilian youth.

In theoretical-methodological terms, this is a theoretical-bibliographical and documentary study, including the reading of legal texts and reference authors to discuss the topic. Content Analysis (Bardin, 2016) was adopted, covering: a) pre-analysis of data collected in legal documents, with selection and reading to identify main ideas and indicators, b) highlighting terms and expressions on the topic, which favored the interpretation and refinement of information in the documents and the constitution of the data corpus, c) inferences and interpretations based on authors in the field of study on basic education, secondary education, and education financing.

Tensions and resistance generated by the New High School

The neoliberalism implemented in Brazil in the 1990s intensified the submission of the State to market logic, despite the supposed historical defense of education as a means of transforming society and developing citizens, recorded in documents and guidelines of international meetings, such as Jomtien (1990), New Delhi (1993), and Dakar (2000), held with the approval of international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank (WB), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In this context “the neoliberal configuration of the minimal State develops in parallel with the universalization and verticalization of the capitalist system of production in a globalized society, in which disparities between rich and poor intensify” (Branco, 2018, p. 11), which strengthens and encourages processes of exclusion of the latter from fundamental rights such as education.

In the educational field, the formative nature of the High School is part of the power relations typical of a society divided into social classes, to which the exercise of intellectual and leadership functions or instrumental functions is attributed. Thus, structural duality predominates in the education of young people, a category that explains the constitution of high school and professional education in Brazil (Kuenzer, 2010).

This duality manifests itself in the educational context through the organization of the education system, via educational assessment, and through the selection and organization of privileged knowledge in training, among others. In the case of High School, the reform affects all these elements, particularly the curriculum. Understanding this duality concerning the school curriculum requires situating it historically, “perceiving it in the context in which it produces itself and is produced, as well as understanding that the curriculum is forged historically and meets social values and ideals” (Zotti, 2005, p. 30). This aspect is especially relevant when discussing the Reform of High School (Brasil, 2017b), notably because it is characterized by a curricular reform, which can be considered one of the elements that create tension.

This reform occurs in the context of economic globalization, with high unemployment rates and the exclusion of a significant portion of the poorest population. Confronting this reality has required actions in various areas of society, aiming to combat the effects of the crises and guarantee social justice, arguments that underpin neoliberal guidelines.

Considered neoliberal in nature, from the beginning, the reform of High School has generated tensions marked by disputes over projects for the education of Brazilian youth. On the one hand, there is the entry of multilateral organizations into the educational field, motivated by the control of poverty - considered an obstacle to economic development and growth in peripheral capitalist countries. On the other hand, the tensions generated by social movements that can hinder the process of capital accumulation and simultaneously waste the productive potential of these subordinate classes (Motta; Frigotto, 2017). From this perspective, according to Motta and Frigotto (2017), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defends “the organic relationship between education, economic growth, and social development” and begins “to monitor school performance at an international level and, with it, define the quality of education: reading, writing, counting, and having basic notions of science” (Motta; Frigotto, 2017, p. 365). This concept of quality is strongly related to the market.

It is necessary to define a standard to be followed by education systems to guarantee this quality, and it is related to the type of worker desired for the productive sector. The knowledge historically produced by humanity is secondary, “acquiring an instrumental character, of immediate and contextualized use, according to the interests of students and the culture of each people” (Rabelo; Jimenez; Mendes Segundo, 2017, p. 16). An example is how the New High School (NEM) reduced human and social sciences knowledge to formative itineraries. The definition of a homogeneous standard to be followed in the elaboration of curricular policies clashes with the principle of a democratic school, one that is organized so that students have access to the highest levels of cultural knowledge of humanity, indispensable for the less privileged popular classes (Saviani, 1994).

Thus, the BNCCEM (Brasil, 2017a) and the reform of High Schools (Brasil, 2017b) are structured in the opposite direction of comprehensive education and do not provide young people with theoretical and practical knowledge that enables them to face the challenges posed by the political and economic situation, condemning them to subordination. Students reacted to this inadequacy with protests and occupations of schools in several states through the social movement OCUPAS 2015/16. Aware of the importance of work for individual citizenship, resulting from the act of transforming and being transformed by nature, they soon realized that the “new” High School denied them opportunities to access the cultural, historical, scientific, and technological heritage inherited from past generations. In addition, they demand a leading role in defining a new High School policy.

Among the students’ questions are the suppression of subjects such as sociology and philosophy, essential for the formation of a critical conscience, the extinction of night-time high school and training itineraries that lead to fragmented training, aimed prematurely at the job market, and the approval of EC 95/2016 (Brasil, 2016a).

Resistance also came from educators, unions, forums, and scientific and academic entities, such as the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd) and the National Association of Education Policy and Administration (ANPAE), which expressed their opposition to the reform, with concerns that fall mainly on training paths, especially professional technical ones. However, these sectors were unable to form a movement on the scale of the high school mobilizations expressed by students affiliated with historical entities, movements without an organic student tradition, and even segments without any connection to classical entities and, in fact, averse to the orthodox form of organization and supporters of “horizontalism and participatory democracy” (Sallas; Groppo, 2022, p. 7).

Thus, although OCUPAS 2015/2016 was unable to raise awareness among other social sectors, such as public education professionals in the various states, remaining isolated and with organizational limitations, which may have contributed to its failure to achieve success and prevent the reform, it became one of the largest social movements in recent decades in Brazil (Araújo; Silva, 2021). An example is that the mobilization managed to obliterate some measures contained in MP 746/2016 (Brasil, 2016b), such as the exclusion of Philosophy and Sociology subjects from the high school curriculum. This impossibility of greater resistance to conquer rights and prevent the advancement of business education concepts, supported by conservative hegemonic tendencies with fascist characteristics of the ruling classes in Brazil, demonstrates the difficulties of articulation of the subaltern classes.

In addition to this emblematic movement, the performance of student representatives at CONAE 2024 highlighted the willingness of young people to participate in the debate on the diagnosis of the reality of high school, the necessary repeal of Law 13,415/2017 (Brasil, 2017b), and to point out paths to build a national policy for this stage of basic education. However, the fight in defense of human, academic, and professional training, from the perspective of a unitary school, will be arduous and require organization and resistance from these movements, including guaranteeing financing.

In the context of the ideological struggle against fascism that rose to power in the 1920s in Italy, Gramsci (2001) pointed out the need for a comprehensive education that would put an end to the dichotomy between intellectual work and manual work and would materialize in a unitary school, where everyone would have access to quality education and training that would enable any student to aspire to leadership roles in the society in which they live.

A national High School policy depends on funding

The debate surrounding the PNE for the decade 2025-2035 occurs in a different political scenario from that in which the NEM reform was approved. The election of Lula³ in 2022 renews the prospects for mobilizing society in defense of a national education project with broad participation, given “[...] the demands for the resumption of the participation of multiple social and political actors in the construction of public policies” (Brazilian National Education Forum [FNE], 2023, p. 9), as highlighted in the Reference Document for the Brazilian National Education Conference - CONAE 2024, whose theme “Brazilian National Education Plan - State policy to guarantee education as a human right, with social justice and sustainable socio-environmental development,” reaffirms the turning point to education.

Based on the discussion of the reference document, the text of the new PNE, discussed in January 2024 in Brasília, is the expression of the commitment of historical subjects, delegates from different social segments, who acted actively, strengthened in the belief of public education as a field of possibilities for integral human formation. To this end, they understand that it is necessary to “rescue and value the meaning of being social, as a public, supportive, ethical and peaceful subject” (FNE, 2023, p. 15).

Regarding Goal 3, the Reference Document states that the objective of universalizing access to high school for students aged 15 to 17 was not achieved since “in 2021, the indicator was 95.3%, that is, 4.7% p.p. below the goal” (FNE, 2023, p. 18). Ensuring access continues to be a challenge to be faced with public policies, “in 2021, 74.5% of the population aged 15 to 17 attended or had already completed basic education, a number that was 10.5% p.p. lower than the target of 85%, established for 2024” (FNE, 2023, p. 18). And yet, half a million young people are out of school.

Addressing this reality, achieving Goal 3 requires public policies under the responsibility of the states and the Federal District, acting in collaboration and with supplementary action by the Federal Government, aiming to develop a national high school policy linked to vocational education, including in the form of education for young people and adults. To this end, it is essential to understand the school in the “conception of a unitary school and a polytechnic school, to guarantee the implementation of integrated high school, in its theoretical-political-pedagogical perspective” (FNE, 2023, p. 63) and the conscious and critical formation of subjects.

From this perspective, the school curriculum must have the work as its educational principle, ensuring an education that combines solid humanitarian training with productive activity, theory and practice, thinking and doing (Gramsci, 2001). The expectation is that the unitary school will break the division between intellectual and manual work and rescue the integral human being, nullified by the class society that divided him between those who hold the means of production and those whose work is exploited (Pacheco, 2022). A national basis for secondary education that reinforces dual education contributes, through education, to strengthening the historical division between leaders and those led, crystallizing existing social relations.

In Brazil, despite two centuries of independence and more than one hundred and thirty years of the Republic, a range of public services has not yet been guaranteed to all citizens, which highlights the fragility of social protection offered by the State and contributes to the increase in social inequalities. One of the historical debts of the Brazilian State to society, especially those belonging to the working classes, is a basic public education of social quality that is referenced, universalized, and governed by democratic relations. This quality education requires public funding. Therefore, it is essential to identify the “movement” required to actually include in the new PNE goals and strategies to financing public education, particularly high school. A necessary action is to resume Goal 20 of the PNE 2014-2024 and some of its strategies in light of what is in the Final Document approved at CONAE 2024, which resulted from debates held by all segments of Brazilian society.

Goal 20 of the 2014-2014 PNE establishes the expansion of public investment in public education to reach at least 7% of GDP by 2019 and 10% by 2024. To this end, it includes 12 strategies that can be summarized as follows: i) guarantee of financing through the collaboration regime between federal entities, “[...] to meet their educational demands in light of the national quality standard” (strategy 20.1), ii) improving the monitoring of education salary resources (strategy 20.2), iii) allocation to the Maintenance and Development of Education (MDE), in addition to the resources linked by article 212 of the Federal Constitution of 1988 (CF),“portion of the participation in the result or financial compensation for the exploration of oil and natural gas and other resources [...]” (strategy 20.3), iv) strengthening transparency and social control of public resources allotted to education (strategy 20.4), v) regular studies and monitoring through the National Institute of Pedagogical Studies “of investments and costs per student in public basic and higher education, in all its stages and modalities” (strategy 20.5), vi) implementation of the Student-Quality Cost (CAQi) to achieve the CAQ (strategy 20.6), vii) implementation of the CAQ itself (strategy 20.7), and viii) its definition by 2017 (strategy 20.8), ix) establishment of cooperation standards between the Federal Government and other federated entities and articulation of the Brazilian National Education System (SNE) (strategy 20.9), x) supplementation by the Federal Government of financial resources to federated entities that did not reach the CAQi (until 2017) and from 2018 the CAQ (strategy 20.10), xi) advocacy for the approval of the Educational Accountability Law (strategy 20.11), xii) distribution of additional resources based on specific criteria, such as equalization of opportunities, social vulnerability and technical and management commitment (strategy 20.12).

Regarding the percentage of 10% of GDP that should have been applied to education, as established by Goal 20 of the PNE 2014-2024, the final document of CONAE 2024 states the following:

It is a level that Brazil can reach, as long as sources are considered, in addition to taxes collected from the population, for example, its natural wealth consisting of water, minerals, oil and gas, the exploration of renewable energy (wind and solar) and other sources developed in the energy transition, as a source of resources for education (FNE, 2024, p. 177-178).

Therefore, CONAE 2024 reaffirms what was already included in Goal 20.3 of the PNE 2014-2024 about increasing the percentage of GDP invested in education. Furthermore, it defends the “[...] need to implement a new goal to reach the equivalent of at least 10% of GDP in public resources applied exclusively to public education,” (FNE, 2024, p. 178) which constitutes progress since Goal 20 of the PNE 2014-2024 does not include the term “exclusively,” which favored the continued channeling of resources to private entities. In this sense, CONAE 2024 demonstrates political clarity regarding the historical disputes in education between the public and private sectors in Brazil.

The emphasis on the necessary increase in the percentage of GDP spent on education is even more accurate if one takes into account a kind of double frustration in this regard since the early 2000s: the first due to the veto by the Government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso to the application of 7% of GDP in the PNE 2001-2011, disregarding the demands of several civil society entities, and the second because, although the percentages provided for in the PNE 2014-2024 were approved, the governments (federal, state and municipal) were unable to comply with the law. In other words, such a “movement” needs to be central; otherwise, the goals and their strategies may not be met, as in the case of the current PNE.

Still, concerning the defense of reaching the percentage of 10% of GDP in public education, it is worth highlighting the following “movements” that appear in the CONAE 2024 Final Document: i) defense of a tax reform guided by social justice and “[...] that is progressive, that is, proportional, those who earn more, pay more” (FNE, 2024, p. 179), ii) the need to increase the percentage of tax resources connected by article 212 of the 1988 Federal Constitution, iii) defense that the constitutional connection includes, in addition to taxes, other tariffs, such as contributions and fees. Regarding the constitutional allocation of resources for education, CONAE 2024 draws attention to the risk that the new fiscal framework and the ongoing tax reform will compromise “the constitutional allocation of resources for education, contained in article 212 of the 1988 Federal Constitution - already in insufficient amounts, considering the financing needs of Brazilian education in the next decade” (FNE, 2024, p. 181).

Strategy 20.4 of the 2014-2024 PNE states that transparency and social control in the use of public resources applied to education should be achieved through the holding of public hearings, creation of electronic transparency portals, training of members of Fundeb monitoring and social control councils, conducted in collaboration between the Ministry of Education (MEC), the State and Municipal Education Departments and the Audit Courts of the Federal Government, states, the Federal District and municipalities. However, it is known that only part of these mechanisms and instruments were implemented and even then only partially, as in the case of public hearings, which were restricted to debates that occurred in the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, with a few honorable exceptions, at the level of states, the Federal District and municipalities. These public hearings were critical but focused on the more general debate about transparency and social control of public resources applied to education.

Regarding the creation of electronic transparency portals, although there is already a reasonable availability of data on public resources applied to education, the format does not appear to meet what strategy 20.4 establishes since an electronic portal within the scope of the transparency and social control categories needs to include basic elements, such as accessibility and non-technical-bureaucratic language. The fact is that the data currently available are very useful to researchers, state control agencies, and professionals in the area of ​​public budgets but not to members of the Monitoring and Social Control Council of the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and the Appreciation of Professionals in Education (CACS-Fundeb) and the general population.

Regarding the training of CACS-Fundeb members, despite the efforts of the federal government to carry it out, it was both insufficient and inadequate. Insufficient because it was held in almost isolated meetings; inadequate because the content organized was for a counselor profile that was quite different from the real one, in addition to the format of this training being remote and with very few simultaneous moments, which made interaction between participants and the necessary exchange of experiences in the different units of the federation about the functioning of the CACS-Fundeb difficult. In this regard, Matos et al. (2022, p. 11) state that “[...] the lack of technical training of the counselors was one of the main difficulties in the CACS’s performance.” Silva (2021) defends specific regulations of CACS-Fundeb, which, among other specificities, should contain details about the continuing education of counselors. In turn, the National Association for Research in Education Financing (FINEDUCA) ratifies the necessary provision of training organized by the Councils in conjunction with governments and internal and external control agencies (FINEDUCA, 2020).

In fact, the term “training” can be questioned, as it tends to lead to a logic of training rather than formation, which is incompatible with the strengthening of counselors. In this regard, the Final CONAE 2024 document did not give due attention to monitoring and social control, and the Fundeb and school feeding councils are only mentioned, as if they were inspection and control agencies, such as the Federal Court of Auditors, the State Court of Auditors, the Comptroller General of the Federal Government, the Public Prosecutor Office and the courts at the state, Federal District and municipal levels. In other words, this “movement” by CONAE 2024 could strengthen the monitoring and social control role of the Fundeb councils and others, which, it is worth emphasizing, do not have an oversight function like the aforementioned control bodies because they do not have the structure for this.

Regarding the CAQi and the CAQ, the CONAE 2024 Final Document maintains the provisions of strategies 20.6, 20.7, 20.8, and 20.10 of the current PNE. It also emphasizes the legal framework that enshrined the CAQ in article 211 of the CF/88 and in Constitutional Amendment No. 108/2020 (Brasil, 2020a), reaffirming that the legislation “[...] needs to be effectively implemented in this new PNE, a fact that did not occur throughout the PNE 2014-2024” (FNE, 2024, p. 181). Thus, the Final Document approved at CONAE 2024 reinforces the defense of the CAQ as essential to guarantee quality education, in line with the National Campaign for the Right to Education (CNDE), which starts from educational needs to identify the financial resources necessary for each federated entity.

Therefore, it is an education financing mechanism that ensures that every student in the national territory is guaranteed the minimum inputs for the practice of quality education. Another important aspect is what is stated in the PNE 2014-2024, namely: in addition to providing for the “acquisition, maintenance, construction and conservation of facilities and equipment necessary for teaching and the acquisition of teaching materials, food, and school transport,” it also highlights that “investments in the qualification and remuneration of teaching staff and other public education professionals will be necessary [...]” (strategy 20.7). Part of the problems experienced in high schools for the implementation of the New High School could be solved by this aspect.

It is also worth highlighting that CONAE 2024 advances and innovates by defending the values ​​of CAQi and CAQ that “consider Brazilian socioeconomic inequality and the historical debt to the black and indigenous population at all stages and modalities [...] and the territorial heterogeneity of the country and the existing regional and intraregional inequalities” (FNE, 2024, p. 183).

The CONAE 2024 Final Document also draws attention to the regulations that “[...] undermine the CAQi and CAQ, in an attempt to undermine their concept and their proposal for quality and financing [...] [and that it would be] necessary to resume the construction of the mechanisms and their implementation as provided for in Law No. 13.005, of 2014 (Brasil, 2014), and approved in EC No. 108, of 2020” (FNE, 2024, p. 183), which is undoubtedly fundamental, especially at a time of project dispute within the scope of educational debates.

Given what was presented about Goal 20, its strategies, and the need to resume compliance with Goal 3 of the PNE 2014-2024 in the new PNE 2025-2035, some “movements” that appear in the CONAE 2024 Final Document will be presented. It is believed that they contribute directly to the discussion about investment in public education as a condition for implementing a national secondary education policy that meets the needs and desires of Brazilian youth and strengthens their education. It can be said that these movements indicate necessary, urgent paths that are contrary to the logic imposed by the now-revoked EC 95/2016 (Brasil, 2016a). In other words, they demand more robust funding from the government, following with the challenge posed to improve Brazilian education, especially for the final stage of basic education.

The first crucial movement is the “incentive through a grant or similar for high school students in full-time schools to guarantee their permanence and completion” (FNE, 2024, p. 34). In view of the creation of the financial-educational incentive, in the form of savings, for students enrolled in public high schools, which became known as Pé-de-Meia [nest egg] - Law No. 14.8182024 (Brasil, 2024b), it can be said that there was an interesting articulation between the Federal Government and civil society that manifested itself in CONAE 2024. It should also be noted that the grant approved by CONAE is part of a logic in which, in addition to access, it is urgent to “[...] guarantee permanence, student assistance for those who need it, quality, inclusion, and equity, with democratic and participatory management” (FNE, 2024, p. 73). The permanence grant is also mentioned in another excerpt from the CONAE 2024 Final Document aiming to:

Promote and guarantee, with quality standards, the integration between state high schools and institutions of the state and federal network of professional and technological education for the provision of integrated and full-time high school education, with at least 7 hours per day, articulated with high school level courses, through the provision of concomitant inter-complementary technical courses, with the implementation of free transportation and food programs, as well as student support grants, with budgetary resources from the Ministry of Education (FNE, 2024, p. 108, emphasis by the authors).

The second movement refers to the necessary and urgent fight against the “outsourcing of the management of educational institutions through social organizations” (FNE, 2024, p. 66), which is incompatible with complex and democratic political-pedagogical projects that meet the needs of young people. Outsourcing, at least as implemented in public education in Brazil in several states, has as its first and last objective the mere saving of resources and not the improvement of services provided to the population. In the case of education, especially in high school, this type of management tends to hamper the development and develop consistent projects that are in line with the desires of young people for the following reasons, among others: i) a tendency for management members to rotate, usually chosen by company owners, even if disguised as a community, religious and philanthropic institutions, i.e., a logic that is distant from and even contrary to democratic management, ii) precarious working conditions for the management team, generally with salaries below market values, defended by the owners of the companies responsible for management, but forgotten when it comes to the amounts paid to managers, iii) tendency to fail to observe the pedagogical documents guiding the political-pedagogical project of education systems.

The third movement draws attention to the need for “[...] support policies to ensure a quality and successful transition” (FNE, 2024, p. 72) for students from elementary school II (6th to 9th grade) to high school. This proposition is crucial, specifically because it addresses a problem also present in the transition from early childhood education to primary education I (1st to 5th grade) and from there to elementary education II. In the case of the transition to high school, CONAE 2024 supports the need for special attention, given what has been stated about the various youth present in society and, of course, also in school. These young people require more than isolated and individual actions from education professionals, although it is always commendable when there is an attempt to do something about this in schools. CONAE presents the need for support policies to break with the spontaneous logic that has not worked.

The fourth movement approved at CONAE 2024 is quite in line with what has been debated within union, student and mainly scientific entities by defending that “[...] professionals working in high schools are duly qualified, receiving adequate training to exercise their teaching functions” (FNE, 2024, p. 73). It can be understood from this statement that CONAE indicates not only the need for adequate initial training, but also continued training so that teachers can guarantee learning (in the plural) to all students without exception. And in defending teacher training, the Conference is not limited to urban areas since it demands compliance with legislation regarding the care of the indigenous population in the high school stage, in the case of the Brazilian National Curricular Guidelines for the Training of Indigenous Teachers in Higher Education and Secondary Education courses (CNE/CP Resolution No. 1/2015), to ensure that the 30.642 indigenous students enrolled in secondary education are served with quality, as far as possible with the “universalization of specific, differentiated, bilingual, intercultural high school, in the in-person modality in all indigenous communities and territories” (Brasil, 2015b, p. 113).

Still on teacher training and pedagogical practices appropriate to the different types of youth that inhabit different high schools, it is worth highlighting the excerpt from the CONAE 2024 Final Document:

[...] encourage pedagogical practices with interdisciplinary approaches structured by the relationship between theory and practice, through collective planning and school curricula with mandatory and elective content, articulated in dimensions such as science, art and ethics, work, languages, technology, culture, and sport, considering the ethnic-racial diversity that structures Brazilian society... (FNE, 2024, p. 100-101).

It is believed that these “movements” have the potential to address historical problems in high school (access and permanence, failure, lag, age/grade, dropout, exclusion and poor performance of students in standardized tests) and to build a national policy for this stage of basic education, which has the unitary school by Gramsci as a reference.

It should be noted that the need for financing education, especially at the high school, has become increasingly clear. It is believed that the next PNE 2025-2035 has great potential to contribute to this due to the Brazilian experience regarding the difficulties in meeting the targets of the current PNE (2014-2024) and the PNE 2001-2010).

Final Considerations

The latest education reform that took place in 2017, after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, is the expression of regulatory maneuvers regarding the education of young people, especially promoted by private entities such as foundations, organizations, institutes, and movements that constitute power structures over the direction of Brazilian education, which is at the service of capital. In this regard, three problems stand out in the New High School Program (Brasil, 2017c), which is connected to the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base: i) it aligns with market interests and transposes to the educational field the assumptions, ideologies, and perspectives of curriculum and assessment that act in conjunction with the logic of standardization and privatization, ii) reduces the general conception of work to a merely utilitarian function and does not advance in overcoming the dichotomy between preparatory education and vocational education, iii) the axis of work, although present in the documents, is assumed as an educational principle from the perspective of capital and not of the worker.

Furthermore, the reform of high schools occurred without dialogue with teachers, students, and organized civil society, highlighting the field of dispute surrounding the project for training Brazilian youth. Therefore, progress is recognized in reestablishing dialogue between the Federal Government/Ministry of Education (MEC) and society through different instruments/mechanisms of participation, following Ordinance No. 399/2023 (Brasil, 2023), which instituted the public consultation for the evaluation and restructuring of the Brazilian National High School Policy. This gesture is relevant, considering the ban to which the scientific-academic community, parents, students, teachers, and staff, in short, the school community, was subjected between 2016 and 2022.

Finally, the final text of CONAE 2024 approves the revocation of the high school reform and the BNCC and ratifies Goal 3 of the PNE 2014-2024, with proposals for the stage that are linked to others related to high school integrated with Professional Education, education for young people, adults and elderly and full-time education. Among these propositions, the following stand out: i) “ensure that at least 85% (eighty-five percent) of students complete secondary education at the regular age, to promote equity and attention to population diversity” (goal 4b), ii) “ensure an adequate level of learning at the end of secondary education for at least 60% (sixty percent) of students by the fifth year of this PNE, and for all by the end of the decade (goal 5d)”, iii) “reduce learning inequalities in high school between social groups defined by race, sex, socioeconomic status and region, [...]” (goal 5e)”, iv) “foster the expansion of the provision of high school with technical professional education in state and district public education networks” (strategy 11.3).

These actions require sufficient funding for their materialization. Thus, the text proposes expanding public investment in education to reach 10% of GDP by the end of the decade, following Article 214 of the Federal Constitution (goal 18.a).

Despite the advances identified in the CONAE 2024 Final Document, resistance to dismantling public education must be more active and organized in the debate on the PNE Bill in the National Congress. Therefore, to do this, it is necessary to revisit the questions that guided the debate in 2003 at the seminar “High School: Science, Culture, and Work,” which aimed to discuss and propose a policy for the final stage of basic education: Which high school education for these young people? What kind of youth is now part of the last stage of basic education?

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• 1
  Dilma Rousseff’s government periods were from January 2011 to December 2014 and January 2015 to August 2016.
• 2
  “Through Complementary Law N. 200/2023, a new tax regime was established that, in practice, restores the 18% bond. The effects will need to be monitored in the coming years” (Brasil, 2024c).
• 3
  Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government periods were from January 2003 to December 2006 and from January 2007 to December 2010. His third government began in January 2023.

• Support/Financing:
  There was no.
• Availability of Research Data:
  The entire data set that supports the results of this study was published in the article itself.
• How to cite this article:
  FERNANDES-SILVA, Edileuza; SILVA, Francisco José da; PACHECO, Ricardo Gonçalves. Brazilian National Education Plan 2025-2035: The relationship between funding and national policy for High School. Educar em Revista, Curitiba, v. 41, e95702, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1590/1984-0411.95702

• Responsible Editor - Associate Editor:
  Elisangela Alves da Silva Scaff;

• Editor in Chief:
  Angela Scalabrin Coutinho

Data availability

The entire data set that supports the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 Aug 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  03 June 2024
• Accepted
  19 Jan 2025