Experiences with Risk-Management and Remote Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil: Crises, Destitutions, and (Possible) Resolutions

Abstract

The chapter examines the difficult conditions under which states, and municipalities had to struggle to ensure learning continued during the social isolation demanded by the COVID-19 crisis in the country. Although it seemed reasonable to expect that the Federal government would respect the constitution and coordinate the educational response to the pandemic, that simply did not happen. The Minister of Education did not consider that such a responsibility should be carried out at the federal level. In the absence of leadership from the central government, the two organizations that congregate subnational secretaries decided to support their members and promote the exchange of practices, with some support from civil society organizations. Through the think tank established by the senior author of this chapter at a private university, CEIPE- Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies, at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, she participated in this effort, mentoring state and municipal level secretaries in their efforts to provide distance learning through a combination of media, such as TV, radio, and digital platforms. The chapter includes her own anecdotal observations of this national effort, drawing on interviews with secretaries and their teams as well as documents related to the experience as the evidence basis of the chapter. Unfortunately, this is not a story of triumph, since Brazil has been one of the countries with more months of schools being completely or partially closed. In addition to the ineffective approach to fighting the disease, which made Brazil’s rate of infection and deaths much worse than many countries in Latin America, the fact that mayoral elections coincided with COVID-19, introduced political reasons for schools to remain closed. The final part of the chapter draws lessons learned and discusses future possibilities for the future of education in Brazil.

2.1 Introduction

Policymakers all over the world have perceived education as a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous enterprise (See, for example, Fadel et al., 2015; Laukkoren et al., 2018), for education cannot be detached from the broader conversations and multifaceted developments driven by cultural, economic, and technological revolutions. Likewise, in both the Global North and the Global South, uncertainty has become a vernacular of development, risk-management constituting the compass through which governments and organizations prevent unforeseeable shocks and mitigate systemic and unexpected threats (World Bank, 2014, pp. 11–13). Despite acceptance that the human race has entered unprecedented territory and accepted education as a complex enterprise, it has become clear that risk-management has not been fully embraced to confront unforeseeable crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These risk-management tenets have tremendous implications for policymaking in education and non-education spaces alike; risk management encompasses the promotion of social insurance, coping and protection mechanisms, the spread of reliable information, as well as decreasing losses resulting from disturbances in the education sector and beyond (World Bank, 2014, p. 13). The surge of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions that it has caused for educational systems have indeed become a wake-up-call, not only in terms of the work that needed to be done for risk-prevention, but for the work that lays ahead as we create effective learning conditions for students who have been historically positioned in the margins, through policy and practice, in a post-pandemic world.

In the context of the Global South Brazil stands as one of the countries in Latin America that has had one of the least systematic responses to the pandemic, prioritizing economic activity over preventive measures, gridlocked by political turmoil while relying on subnational levels of government to lead the efforts to combat the pandemic (Mello, 2020a; World Bank, 2020a, p. 37). Having the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other countries, such as China and Italy, which had already been impacted by first-wave infections by the end of February 2020 (Plümper & Neumayer, 2020), the federal government in Brazil was reluctant to take preventive measures to contain the spread of the virus and support local educational systems to deal with novel situations and deep uncertainties, as well as cope with systemic crises. This chapter provides a description of such developments between March 2020 and January 2021, and highlights the complementary roles of civil society organizations, the private sector, and the international community in strengthening risk-management to promote learning during school closures in Brazil. It also highlights the role of the state/public sector in advancing formal mechanisms to ensure that efforts aligned with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 4 are sustained to promote quality and equity in education—the promotion of equal opportunities across several dimensions of diversity such as gender, sex, race, ethnicity, etc.

Written in a chronological order, this chapter is structured in three major sections. In the first section, titled “Education and its discontents with COVID-19 in Brazil,” we set the context examining policy, distance learning, curriculum, and teaching. We briefly describe the governance structure of the Brazilian educational systems, as delineated by the 1988 Brazilian constitution and the 1996 National Education Law (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação, or LDB) and portray the political milieu that has driven policy decisions pertaining to curriculum and teaching at national and subnational levels, starting in March 2020 up to July 2020. To further qualify the discussions, Claudia Costin, the senior author, the Director of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies (CEIPE), includes her own anecdotal reflections on the national effort drawing on her mentoring experiences with state and municipal secretaries of education as they began to provide distance learning through a combination of media channels such as TV, radio, and digital platforms. In the second section, titled “The variance of responses against COVID-19,” we synthesize data from qualitative and mixed methods research gathered by not-for-profit, civil society, government, and private organizations in Brazil, especially from July 2020 onwards, to shed light on stakeholders’ perspectives on such policy responses with a focus on equity. In this section, we also underscore the growing tensions raised in the second semester of 2020 when certain subnational levels of government attempted to gradually reopen schools. We argue that the shocks on the educational system caused by COVID-19 have (and will) inequitably hinder growth and development in Brazil. Finally, in the concluding section titled “Planting seeds of hope in shaken terrain,” we briefly elaborate on steps that can help the country advance its development agenda in times of recovery.

In this chapter, we provide insights for educational policy formulation and research by considering risk-management tenets while considering the colonial histories of a nation-state such as Brazil. Until very recently, race was absent in discussions about social policy in the country (Todaro & Smith, 2015, p. 34; Reid, 2014, p. 181), but this is rapidly changing due to heinous acts of violence against Black and Indigenous communities in Brazil and abroad. This has raised awareness about discrimination and further galvanized public action from long-standing, anti-racist grassroot movements, as well as organizations which now have become even more active in questioning and addressing the roots of systemic oppression (See, for example, Cruz & Vicente, 2020; Instituto Unibanco, 2020; Westin, 2020; Kim Abe, 2020). We write this essay attuned to these pivotal developments and provide insights about educational policy with an intersectional lens, not only to promote social justice in a very unequal landscape such as Brazil, but also as a sine qua non of discourses on development focused on freedom (Sen, 1999). Given the scope of this book and space constraints, this chapter is a synopsis of both struggles and successes in delivering educational opportunities during these unprecedented times in Brazil.

2.2 Education and Its Discontents with COVID-19 in Brazil: When the Wave of Uncertainty Hits the Hardest, Risk-Management Needs to Be in Place

Brazil is home to a complex system of educational governance guided by several laws which determine the shapes and contours of the enterprise. As per the 1988 Brazilian constitution and the 1966 National Education Law (Brazil, 1996), the federal, state, and municipal governments are bestowed divergent yet complementary responsibilities. For example, the federal government, through the Ministry of Education (MEC), has been assigned the responsibility to create a National Plan for Education (Plano Nacional de Educação) to set normative guidelines for policymaking at both state and municipal levels, playing a distributive, financial, and advisory role. By the same token, states, and municipalities, through a system of collaboration and with the support from the federal government, have been given the authority to offer compulsory education for all, from early childhood to upper secondary education. In this capacity, municipalities offer early childhood education, primary and lower secondary education (in the International Standard Classification of Education, levels 0, 1 and 2), whereas state governments become responsible to offer lower and, most importantly, upper secondary education (in the International Standard Classification of Education, 2 and 3). Meanwhile, the federal government became primarily responsible to offer tertiary education. With 26 states, a Federal District, and 5,568 municipalities, coherence is paramount to provide resources and sustain equitable learning at all levels of education and to advance the Sustainable Development agenda proposed by the United Nations. After all, educational processes are a complex enterprise, especially in a federation; it requires systematic management strategies among federal and subnational government spheres to plan for a robust national strategy for education, one which can overcome structural barriers and administering unforeseeable shocks.

Despite evidence that collaboration among national and subnational levels governments can bring positive educational outcomes in a federation such as Brazil (Abrucio et al., 2016; Carnoy et al., 2017; World Bank, 2017, p. 5; Loureiro et al., 2020, pp. 9–11), cooperation between federal and subnational systems has deteriorated as new waves of uncertainty brought by the COVID-19 pandemic materialized. The major newspapers in the country began to spread information about the new virus back in January 2020 (Folha de São Paulo, 2020) when the world started to learn about the public health situation in Wuhan, China. By the end of February 2020, other nations in Europe had already begun to experience first-wave infections. Brazil, on the other hand, started to report its first cases consisting of upper-middle class travelers who had visited European countries and had been exposed to the new virus (Pescarini et al., 2020; Oliveira, 2020; Ministry of Health, 2020a). In the beginning of March, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified the outbreak as a global pandemic. Concerns regarding community transmission among the most vulnerable—particularly people living in remote regions or in the slums of Brazil who would not have the basic means (e.g., water and soap) to protect themselves and their families—gained prevalence in the country (Ribeiro, 2020). Contrary to the upper-middle class, who had access to basic sanitary goods and enjoyed greater mobility due to lower household densities while abiding to social distancing measures, lower-income households struggled to follow risk-management procedures determined by health authorities.

For example, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the household density in the dwelling favelas is greater compared to affluent regions (Rio de Janeiro Prefecture, 2016; Observatório SEBRAE, 2015). Despite advancements with social policies such as Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program highly esteemed by the international community (Lindert et al, 2007), the vacuum of government authority, political interference, corruption, and large-scale bureaucracy, among other commonly perceived iterative elements of ineffective-governance, continued to sabotage the development of the country in the education sector and beyond (See, for example, Akhtari et al., 2014; Saunders, 2016; Lisboa & Latif, 2013; Machoski & Araujo, 2020). With a Gini coefficient of 0,6391 (Ministry of Health, 2010)—an aggregate numerical measure which portrays income inequality in a scale of 0 to 1, from perfect equality to perfect inequality, respectively—the degree of inequality is still a conspicuous feature of the intersectional social fabric of the city across different dimensions of diversity including race, sex, and gender. These discrepancies are also representative of the national landscape, evident not only in terms of relative income disparities across several dimensions of diversity, but also in relation to other human development indicators such as the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) and the Gender Inequality Index (GII) (UNDP, 2018). Predictably, the population positioned at the periphery, mostly composed of People of Color and Indigenous peoples, would be impacted the most by the COVID-19 pandemic, thus exacerbating historical inequalities in Brazil.

Public outcry targeted at such systemic and intersectional inequalities, as well as concerns with the fate of an already collapsing economy before the global pandemic, led the federal government to issue a decree on March 18th, 2020 to establish a state of calamity in Brazil. Between March 17th and March 18th, the Ministry of Education (MEC) released its first official statements concerning the pandemic: (i) an ordinance (ordinance nº 343) permitting the employment of distance learning at scale in tertiary institutions throughout the course of the pandemic (Brazil, 2020) and (ii) a media release providing advice to post-graduate students who studied abroad on national scholarships about financial matters and travel restrictions (MEC, 2020a). By March 20th, 2020, the federal decree was approved on the floor of the Senate, in its first online session, thus uplifting public health expenditure restrictions to contain the spread of the virus and combat the economic and social effects of the pandemic nationwide (Planalto, 2020). By the same token, state and municipal governments started to enact decrees of calamity and emergency which impacted both public and private spheres, including the educational sector, which had recently started the school year. Each state in Brazil, followed by municipalities, enacted measures to prevent the spread of the new virus. In Table 1 of the Appendix, we provide a list of the first decrees and normative measures enacted by every state in Brazil, including the Federal District. Within 10 days, between March 14th and March 23rd, in the first stage of the pandemic, all states in Brazil issued legislative and normative measures to close public and private schools. Most subnational levels of government optimistically determined that schools would be closed for a period of 15 or 30 days and that these days would later supplant the mid-year school vacation, thus preventing major disruptions in the school calendar.

2.3 The Loss of Instructional Time and the Sense of Urgency to Mitigate COVID-19 Shocks

According to a study conducted by Barbara Bruns and Javier Luque, Brazil already loses approximately one day of weekly class instruction due to classroom management issues, dysfunctional relational dynamics in classrooms, etc. (Bruns & Luque, 2014). Understanding the importance of learning for economic participation and as one dimension of/for citizenship,¹ as well as the positive correlations between teacher quality, curriculum, instruction and learning (e.g. Darling-Hammond, 2000; Morshed et al., 2010; Blömeke et al., 2016), concerns regarding the status of these levers of change have grown in policy circles across Brazil, especially after results from national and international evaluations such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have become available (Reid, 2014, pp. 175–178). One would imagine that such concerns would drive the response to the pandemic, as a matter of urgency, in our national agenda, for continuity of learning can be decisive in promoting better opportunities for students placed at-risk under systems of oppression and dispossession. However, under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, the Minister of Education (MEC) Abraham Weintraub shirked responsibilities to coordinate the national response against COVID-19 in the educational sector.² His approach undermined risk-management sharing among key development actors and left a vacuum which had to be immediately filled to overcome prevailing losses with the interruption of schooling activities. Subnational levels of government—strongly represented by organizations such as the Brazilian Council of Educational Secretaries (CONSED) and the National Union of Municipal Directors of Education (UNDIME)—with the aid of civil society organizations, the private sector, and the international community, began to join efforts to strengthen risk-management strategies to combat food insecurity and prevent learning disruptions throughout the course of the pandemic. Through uniting, they worked with celerity to deliver services at scale so that every student could at least have access to some form of distance education, a proxy for face-to-face learning, and conditions to feed themselves—basic rights which are considered pivotal constituent components of development as freedom in a democracy.

Alarmed at the developments in Brazil and abroad, the director of CEIPE-FGV, Claudia Costin, one of the authors of this chapter, began to work with her team to support secretaries of education to minimize the shocks originated from school closures while observing international responses to the pandemic. One of the major goals of CEIPE-FGV is to prepare leadership to address the most pernicious issues in the educational sector of Brazil (CEIPE-FGV, 2020), from shifting the usual “crisis-fighter” approach to management in education to a sustained, proactive, and systematic risk approach to leadership—one which (i) understands the contextually regulative, normative, cultural-cognitive and racial dimensions/dynamics of institutional reforms and which (ii) acts upon these dimensions, in collaboration with other development actors, to plan and promote quality and equitable learning beyond one’s four-year electoral tenure, at all levels of education. Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), the tertiary institution that houses the organization, has also been proactive in supporting the spread of reliable information and resources to aid the response to the pandemic (Costin et al., Forthcoming). At CEIPE-FGV, Costin has personally mentored fifty-three secretaries of education—fifty municipal level secretaries and three state level secretaries—and has worked closely with them to respond to distinct crises and shocks before and during the pandemic.

Institutionally, CEIPE-FGV has compiled and translated documents to share reliable information and practices from national and international educational systems while accounting for intricacies of local context, and promoted several webinars with the support of Instituto República (https://republica.org) to aid the response of secretaries of education across Brazil (e.g. Costin, 2020a; Melnick & Darling-Hammond 2020; FGV, 2020). Practically, all involved in this work at CEIPE-FGV were cognizant that knowledge-sharing was just one side of a complex web of strategies to strengthen risk-management, avoid dropouts, and promote learning in adversity. After all, several structural barriers such as lack of internet connectivity in households and teacher preparedness (e.g., the extent to which teachers feel comfortable/trained to use technology) could jeopardize the response to the pandemic. Indeed, data collected prior to the pandemic highlighted, for example, (i) discrepancies between households with internet access in urban versus rural areas (70% vs. 44%, respectively) (CETIC, 2019), and (ii) a large percentage of teachers (60–70%) who felt a high need to hone skills in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (World Bank, 2020b, p. 112). These were simple statistics that depicted a tiny proportion of the challenges that we would face in sustaining education opportunities across diverse communities throughout the course of the pandemic in Brazil, but a reality which could have not prevented leaders from acting.

2.4 New Means of Instruction and Curriculum Reprioritization in the COVID-19 Context

As the end of the first two weeks of lockdown neared, awareness spread that the pandemic would last for as long as a vaccine would be made available, all states and municipalities started to issue other decrees and normative measures to expand the period of school closures. As a result, subnational governments and development organizations from several sectors began to rethink (i) the means of instruction, advocating for mixed approaches to teaching and learning at different stages of education and, consequently, (ii) the scope and delivery of the formal curriculum in the COVID-19 context, as well as (iii) preemptive strategies to facilitate the restoration of face-to-face classes. From the outset, one of the first measures was to evaluate which resources subnational governments had at their disposal (e.g., online platforms, radio and TV channels, capabilities to support the delivery of lessons and homework, etc.), or which assets they could allocate to either create or strengthen these systems of coping and protection to ensure that education would not be interrupted in a state of calamity. Such concerns were paramount to discussions concerning mitigation and educational opportunity in the second stage of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic during April, May, and June 2020. At CEIPE-FGV, speaking with secretaries of education in our mentorship program, we began to think strategically about how educational systems could combine different modes of delivery and instruction to ensure that losses would be mitigated, especially at crucial stages of human development (e.g., during the first years of ISCED level 1 when children learn and hone their literacy skills, and in the last year of ISCED level 3 when youth begin to transition to tertiary education). We also evaluated how to maintain the supply of school lunches by giving staple basic products to families, etc. Moreover, we promoted communication amongst stakeholders, engaging secretaries to support teachers in their professional development and encouraging them to connect to parents via telephone and social media using apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram, with special attention to households that had children with special educational needs.

For instance, in the city of Boa Vista, the capital of the state of Roraima, Brazil, the vice-mayor and secretary of education, Arthur Henrique, was already responding to unforeseeable developments in the educational sector as a result of a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, receiving immigrants from our neighboring country and adopting measures to make their transition to Brazil less traumatic (e.g. elaborating and applying examinations in Spanish so that learning could be sustained and immigrants’ identities maintained) (Costin, 2020b). The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated risks in several dimensions, especially the social and emotional, which are the basis of a holistic education and key factors for human flourishing. Mitigating additional hindrances caused by the pandemic, the secretary consulted teachers, who had already begun to propose activities to students, and created a new system wide initiative called “Boa Vista Learns at Home” (Boa Vista Aprendendo em Casa). The secretary designed and offered a formal, malleable curriculum that could be adapted by teachers while prioritizing key knowledge and skills aligned with Brazil’s National Common Core, translating it into lesson plans and sharing these resources via Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/aprendendoemcasabv/?hl=en) and WhatsApp (Chaves, 2020).

Based on the premise that through new channels of delivery the full scope of the formal curriculum could no longer be achieved, that educational experience would be circumscribed; policymakers and educators began to take stock of a new form of curriculum-as-plan. Brazil has very recently designed, approved, and begun to implement its first National Common Core, BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular) making it a norm that all children across all dimensions of diversity in all regions of Brazil enjoy the same learning rights while respecting the intricacies of local context (for more information regarding the curriculum reform, see Costin & Pontual, 2020). This has been an ambitious reform focused on equity and learning, operated within the parameters proposed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in its competence-based framework. The COVID-19 pandemic brought ambiguity to how our formal curriculum would be executed in an unanticipated context—at all levels of compulsory education and under considerable time and structural constraints. In this context, curriculum flexibilization and prioritization became the terminology that guided the translation of BNCC expectations into COVID-19 contextual learning priorities in the city of Boa Vista and beyond.

Indeed, at the national level, the ongoing curriculum question “What knowledge is of most worth” became even more accentuated as curriculum specialists continued to grapple with the task of prioritizing knowledge and curricular content while facing a global health crisis. At that time, the Brazilian not-for-profit organization, Instituto Reúna (https://institutoreuna.org.br), noticing disparities between BNCC’s high expectations and the knowledge possessed by students, had already begun to design “learning maps” aligned with BNCC’s learning rights (https://institutoreuna.org.br/projeto/mapas-de-foco-bncc/). Departing from a behavioral, knowledge-based approach and from a contextual diagnosis of students’ capabilities, these “learning maps’’ would serve as compass to help leaders, pedagogical coordinators and teachers reprioritize their formal curricula by connecting specific knowledge and skills across areas of knowledge (e.g., Languages and Sciences) and levels of education (ISCED level 2 and 3). These “learning maps” differentiated learning in three categories: ‘focal,’ ‘complementary’ and ‘expectations for fluency,’ the latter only available in the curricula components of Portuguese and Mathematics. The ‘focal learning’ is considered non-negotiable, deemed necessary for the development of the child (e.g., skills related to literacy development and writing), whereas learning in the ‘complementary’ and ‘fluency’ domains offer opportunities for further development and mastery, the latter representing a stage where students mobilize ‘objects of knowledge’ and ‘skills’ paramount for a specific level of education (Casagrande, 2020). Utilizing this method, educational systems are then supported to select and design curriculum content, didactic material, sequences, and lesson plans, as well as consider appropriate evaluation methods by considering their contextual needs during COVID-19. These “learning maps” have also been promoted by CONSED and UNDIME, institutions that galvanized cooperation from public, private, supranational and philanthropic organizations, including a research center at a public university, the Center for Public Policies and Evaluation in the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (CAEd/UFJF), to create an online platform titled “Supporting Learning” (Portuguese: Apoio à Aprendizagem) available at https://apoioaaprendizagem.caeddigital.net/#!/pagina-inicial. Over seven thousand users have accessed this platform, which has offered resources, including Instituto Reúna’s learning maps, to guide mitigation strategies throughout the course of the pandemic, including resources for when face-to-face classes resume.

2.5 The Variance of Responses Against COVID-19 and the Waning of Learning and Participation

At that stage in our response to mitigate COVID-19, when subnational levels of government had already begun to implement their coping strategies, a need to understand the variance of responses in the educational sector arose to qualify policy deliberations. Several organizations started to collect data from multiple stakeholders—education secretaries, students, parents, and teachers—from March 2020 onwards, thus facilitating discussions about risk-management, equity, and learning. The research available provided some encouraging information, but it also highlighted woeful discrepancies regarding risk-management strategies that aimed to sustain educational opportunity and wellness across Brazil, concerns directly related to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development agenda. For example, the research project “Education Cannot Wait” —See second table in the Appendix where we synthesize data from some of these research initiatives—indicated that 93% of municipal respondents had aligned their pedagogical interventions with BNCC’s learning rights, thus preventing further delays to translate BNCC’s orientations into pedagogical interventions once face-to-face classes resume. Regarding discrepancies, the research projects “Feelings and Perceptions of Brazilian Teachers” and “Youth and the COVID-19 Pandemic” highlighted a percentage difference, albeit not from representative samples, between male and female respondents regarding their perceptions on wellness, which can raise several hypotheses about gender disparities. Moreover, the research project “Education Cannot Wait” and “Distance Education, Wave 1” underscored regional incongruencies regarding access to formal education in the COVID-19 context. In some cases, municipalities could employ in-place mechanisms to cope and sustain educational opportunity. There were also cases where municipalities mobilized new resources to implement brand new strategies. For instance, in the city of Senador Canedo in the state of Goiás, in addition to using YouTube and radio channels to offer distance education, the department handed out USB drives with pre-loaded activities to students who had computers at home, but no access to the internet. The department also created its own online domain (http://www.semecsenadorcanedo.com.br) to share information with stakeholders throughout the course of the pandemic and registered students and teachers in Google classroom (Faria et al., 2020, pp. 9–10).

The research project “Education Cannot Wait” pointed out that opportunities for access were indeed greater in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil among municipalities that had participated in the survey. This finding is interesting because it aligns with the data provided by the World Bank in its index of “student vulnerability” to school closures (World Bank, 2020b, p. 113). The construct of “vulnerability” has been calculated based on five variables— (i) availability of meals at school, (ii) usage of technology by educators in classrooms, (iii) family engagement, (iv) number of students who work, and (v) past dropouts—and indicates vulnerability from 0 to 1, from less vulnerable to critically vulnerable, respectively (World Bank, 2020b, p. 113). Only one state from the North/Northeast regions was represented in the group of six states, plus the Federal District, positioned below the national average (0,495) in student vulnerability. Conversely, all states positioned towards the tip of the curve in “critical vulnerability” were represented by states in the North/Northeast regions. These statistics demonstrate a historical fact regarding states’ and municipalities’ divergent regional capacities to offer educational opportunity in Brazil—a deed which encouraged federal and subnational levels of government to create and maintain the Primary and Secondary Education Maintenance and Development Fund (FUNDEB), a collective financial mechanism that amasses resources amongst subnational levels of government to subsequently share them with contributors based on their weighted number of students across different levels of education, from ISCED level 0 to ISCED level 5 (Todos Pela Educação, 2020).

Regional disparities are important in denouncing equity disparities in the country. Like analyses that link zip codes to poverty indexes, these statistics demonstrate that privileges rather than rights have constituted the making of democratic Brazil, that unearned advantages continue to travel across space to offer better opportunities to some segments of the population. However, despite its relevance, such statistics can only denounce a facet of inequality; statistics can only tell so much about the face of injustice because they lack a human dimension. In fact, these statistics alone can end up shifting the focus from pivotal constitutive dimensions of oppression, while bolstering discourses that are color-blind and fail to denounce disparities across dimensions of diversity. Most often, they have the capacity to hide the societal engineering that has shaped Brazilian culture and the historical forces that have fabricated lives, such as the deep, troubling colonial histories that forged the making of democratic Brazil (See Ribeiro, 2000, for a historical analysis concerning the formation of Brazil). Thus, in verifying whether equity constitutes the foundation of an educational system and whether freedoms constitute the core of development, we find it pivotal to view data through an intersectional lens to understand how different dimensions of diversity (such as race, class, and gender) come together to enact different kinds of privileges and levels of freedoms in our democracy.

In this regard, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) conducted a pivotal initiative during the first stages of the pandemic by collecting household data via phone calls on a monthly basis, from May to November, as part of its National Household Sample Survey (Pnad), available at https://COVID19.ibge.gov.br/pnad-COVID/. Aiming to estimate the number of people with COVID-19 symptoms and quantify some of the impacts on the labor market (IBGE, 2020a), the applied questionnaire of July–October 2020 collected information regarding individuals’ gender, ethnicity, age, etc. It also provided data regarding school/university enrollments and whether individuals had been offered any form of distance education activity (e.g., online classes and homework) during the first stages of the response to the pandemic (IBGE, 2020b). This data provides a glimpse of how lives are differently (re)produced in contexts where “rights” are sustained for a few; it shows important disparities between those who had been granted access to formal education during the pandemic—in this case, offered some form of distance education—and those who did not.

The Research and Training Nucleus on Race, Gender and Social Justice of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Afro-CEBRAP), one of the first organizations to draft reports using Pnad COVID-19 data, highlighted that the proportion of the population of non-White students (Black, Brown and Indigenous people) who participated in educational activities in June 2020, was extremely low compared to the White student population (White and people of Asian descent) across all regions of Brazil, in addition to disparities in internet access, health insurance, etc. (See Prates, 2020; Lima et al., 2020; Venturini et al., 2020). This information corroborates recent research that suggested that structural barriers and biases/prejudices against communities of color have shaped the lives of these individuals in classrooms and beyond. For example, these structural factors have affected the performance of Black students in the Brazilian Basic Education Evaluation System (SAEB) (Iede, 2020) and increased the likelihood of getting infected and dying by COVID-19 in Brazil (Baqui et al., 2020). Indigenous communities have also been greatly impacted by COVID-19 (Dias & Leonel, 2020). The new virus has become an imminent risk to elders—the “guardians of memory” (Bergamaschi & Medeiros, 2010, p. 63) responsible to transmit wisdom and knowledge across generations—and, consequently, a threat to traditional knowledge and Indigenous education (Milhorance, 2020).

2.6 The Attempt to Gradually Reopen Schools to Avoid Further Losses: The Contentious Site of Education

With growing concerns about intersectional and generational disparities, in the last semester of 2020, from July onwards, some decision makers became more attuned to global developments as international data regarding school openings circulated within policy circles. At that time, the OECD had released its Education at a Glance report comparing the loss of instructional time between OECD and partner countries. The duration of school closures ranged from 7 to 19 weeks, with Brazil falling in a runner-up position with a total of 16 weeks of closure (OECD, 2020, p. 359), a fact that raised concerns about students’ mental health and their ability to continue participating in formal education. By the same token, Brazilian organizations also collected and shared data concerning decisions to reopen schools in several countries while observing health mandates in both Global North and South contexts, reporting whether COVID-19 infections increased, decreased, or remained constant as a function of schools’ decisions to reopen (See, for example, Vozes da Educação, 2020). Unfortunately, however, the amount of reliable information shared with stakeholders did not seem to match the rate of coordination or the rate in which new educational policies were implemented to circumvent the loss of instructional time.

Without national coordination in a decentralized system and engulfed by contentious discourses that either lambasted or praised those who advocated for the implementation of sustainable plans to reopen schools and safeguard educational opportunity, the country maintained a stark, heterogeneous response to the pandemic. According to a survey distributed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in that same period, some states had begun to plan to gradually reopen schools by (i) designing a calendar to allow different groups of students to attend face-to-face classes on specific days; (ii) creating school shifts opposite to regular school hours; and (iii) prioritizing certain levels of education such as Early Childhood Education (ECE) (UNESCO, 2020). By employing these and other programs, educational leaders aimed to sustain educational opportunity, decrease the number of students per class so as not to overcrowd classes in the future and, therefore, decrease the rate of school and out-of-school infections. Notwithstanding, there were also educational systems that had no plans in place to resume face-to-face classes and offer hybrid education in the new COVID-19 context (UNESCO, 2020).

This heterogeneous response was not, however, only a product of deficient coordination or the fact that different geographic regions experienced divergent rates of infection, but also the result of several opinions that prioritized the short-term benefits of economic activity over the long-term beneficial effects of continued education. Contrary to other educational systems around the world which prioritized schooling and education as a human right, Brazil predominantly chose to facilitate the trade of goods and services by opening not only shopping malls, but also pubs and bars in lieu of schools. This conspicuous trend exposed the status of education in our national agenda in both times of prosperity and risk sharing. Moreover, divergent technical opinions discouraged plans to reopen schools, arguing that such measures would put the health of the population in jeopardy (See, for example, Fiocruz, 2020). Dissonances in public opinion were evident during this period—an estimated 76% of Brazilians adamantly rejected plans to resume face-to-face classes or implement hybrid modes of education (Datafolha & Folha de S. Paulo, 2020). It also incited teachers to advocate for better sanitary and working conditions, as well as call for inclusion in the first group to receive vaccines, whenever these would be made available.³

On the one hand, these social developments demanded greater attention from mayors and secretaries of education to democratically engage in public deliberations before enacting any reopening plans, especially considering new municipal elections. On the other hand, they catalyzed seemingly incongruous programs and responses across the country. For example, in the State of São Paulo, the governor issued separate decrees in July and August 2020, decrees 65.016 and 65.061 respectively, authorizing schools to optionally and gradually reopen insofar as state and local health procedures were followed (São Paulo’s State Legislative House, 2020a, b). Nevertheless, according to national media outlets, adherence among municipalities in the state were low because of public scrutiny and distrust: as of December 6th, 2020, only 219 out of 645 municipalities joined these efforts (Mello, 2020b). In the city of Rio de Janeiro, another interesting development happened, for the state and the municipality diverged in their normative measures. The city of Rio de Janeiro issued a statement allowing private schools to resume classes optionally and gradually in early August for certain grades of primary and lower secondary education. According to the mayor, this would serve as a trial that would later inform decisions to reopen public schools (Rio de Janeiro Prefecture, 2020). However, public prosecution brought forth a case to the judiciary system against this provision, citing other decrees issued by the state legislature that had promulgated school reopenings to a later date, while alleging that the mayor’s decision would be in detriment of the common good: not only could it create disparities between private and public systems, but it could also increase the rate of COVID-19 infections (Public Prosecution Office in the State of Rio de Janeiro, 2020a, b). The judiciary system later maintained that private schools would remain closed in the city (Judiciary system in the state of Rio de Janeiro, 2020), a decision that was later overruled by that same judicial system (Castro, 2020).

As the last months of 2020 ended these contentious debates did not cease but rather became a focal point of national debate. For example, in early January, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) office in Brazil issued a letter to the 5,568 elected mayors pleading for their support to put education first and prioritize reopening plans in their administrative agendas (UNICEF, 2020). These calls were backed up by new research that evaluated the effects of country-wide school closures on learning and the development of knowledge and skills at national and international levels (See, for example, Kuhfeld et al, 2020; Agostinelli et al., 2020). At that time, policymakers had not only information regarding who had the most access to schooling activities, but also estimations of how such disparities in access would translate into learning losses. In Brazil specifically, another coalition between a research center at Fundação Getulio Vargas, the Center for Learning on Evaluation and Results for Brazil and Lusophone Africa (FGV EESP Clear), and the Lemann Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that has fostered several education partnerships throughout the years, produced evidence regarding learning losses in the Brazilian context. Using a methodology employed by the World Bank in its report “Simulating the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on schooling and learning outcomes: a set of global estimates” and retrieving data from SAEB, the researchers estimated significant learning losses for students in lower and upper secondary education. In a worst-case scenario, compared to a typical schooling year, FGV EESP Clear estimated a 72% loss in learning for lower secondary students. In an optimistic scenario, the estimate would constitute a loss of 14%. Similarly, for upper secondary students, the estimates were 72% and 15%, respectively (FGV EESP Clear, 2020, p. 6).

In addition to estimated learning losses, dropouts have also constituted an issue of paramount importance for Brazil: an estimated number of four million students, ages 6–34, abandoned schools in 2020 because of COVID-19 related issues (C6 Bank, 2021). In a country where the opportunity cost of attending schools has been disproportionately high for students at risk, shocks such as this one can seriously alter one’s life trajectory. Knowing that dropping out of school can affect students’ self-esteem and impose long-term barriers to return to school, these numbers set a concerning path for Brazil and raise a red flag for our recovery strategies. Hence, despite collective efforts, the current systems of social protection and risk management in Brazil have not been sufficient to fully mitigate the wave of uncertainty brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has materialized into a tsunami of losses, especially for the most vulnerable, making our quest toward equality of opportunity even more difficult; the road towards emancipation and freedom has been significantly extended for Brazilian citizens.

2.7 Planting Seeds of Hope in Shaken Terrain: The Possibilities to Build a Future After a Traumatic Event

As the previous section suggested, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and will continue to exacerbate historical inequalities which have constituted the making of democratic Brazil. From barriers to access to learning losses, the nation has struggled to ensure that education constitutes a human right rather than a luxury good in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the new coronavirus has tested the ability of institutions to face adversity and mitigate risks. This ability to confront crises has a direct impact on ordinary citizens’ ratings and perceptions of institutions’ readiness, malleability, and efficiency. Certainly, the extent to which this pandemic has diminished or increased trust on current governance structures requires further empirical consideration. Nevertheless, not all institutions seem to be able to strengthen risk-management tenets, and we observe important social developments that can be linked to citizens’ evaluation of institutional performance. For example, the new Ministry of Education decided to carry out the Brazilian National High School Evaluation (ENEM) in January 2021. ENEM is an extremely important exam, and it represents a rite of passage in Brazil because it serves as a classificatory tool for college entrance nationwide. Originally scheduled for November 2020, the exam was postponed for a few months as a mitigation strategy, which also gave students more time to prepare in the novel COVID-19 context. However, over 50 percent of students who had registered to participate in both in person and online formats did not show up to examination sites in January 2021. Absenteeism was extremely high compared to previous years, in both modes of delivery. Several reasons could have caused this phenomenon, including social fears of getting infected by the new coronavirus and general negative social perceptions of institutional capacity to administer this examination in a time of crisis. In a nutshell, COVID-19 tested the ability of institutions to collectively mitigate risks to deliver public goods, affecting social perceptions of institutional performance with implications for social welfare and democracy.

By the same token, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the roles of diverse institutions in strengthening risk management. There exists a longstanding debate in Brazil about whether other sectors, other than the public, should play a role in the field of education. This debate must certainly be ongoing in a democracy, and we believe COVID-19 provided an opportunity for people to re-evaluate how diverse sectors can come together to strengthen the response to unforeseeable crises and deliver educational opportunity for all, especially when longstanding institutions face internal dilemmas and crisis of their own. Indeed, rather than substituting or replacing development forces, COVID-19 underscored the importance of relying on several sources to strengthen risk management to mitigate shocks in complementary ways. This global health crisis has created an opportunity to keep this conversation alive, and it has the power to raise awareness and foster novel insights about the complementary ways in which development actors can come together to prevent losses and foster development as freedom.

Besides this opportunity to rethink development, the country has also accumulated several lessons that may inform our recovery agenda in the days to come. For example, in the State of Goiás, the social innovation start-up Movva (https://movva.tech/en/about/) incentivized high school students to stay “engaged in distance learning activities (online and offline) and enrolled in school when face-to-face classes resume” (Lichand & Christen, 2020, p. 2). This start-up powered an intervention by sending text messages to over 12,000 high school students over the course of four weeks (Lichand & Christen, 2020, p. 2). The messages contained encouraging statements such as “It is normal to be afraid in times of uncertainty. Use this scenario to your advantage: take the opportunity to develop the ability to focus on your plans for the future” (Lichand & Christen, 2020, p. 11). Undertaking a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) and monitoring student dropouts and their self-reported levels of motivation, researchers were able to claim that this strategy worked to nudge students during the pandemic. For example, only 13.5% of students in the treatment group maintained that they would not go back to school when classes resumed, compared to 24% in the control group (Lichand & Christen, 2020, p. 3).

In addition to interventions to prevent school dropouts, Brazil has also advanced its agenda to close the “digital divide,” a historic and distinct feature of our educational landscape (Rosa & Azenha, 2015). Although civil society and other segments felt that the mitigation response from the Ministry of Education was inadequate, the National Congress of Brazil demonstrated a will to support an agenda of development focused on equity. Several congresspeople drafted and approved the bill PL 3477/2020, which has recently been forwarded to the Senate, to ensure that public students and teachers have access to the internet during these unprecedented times (National Congress of Brazil, 2020). Another important and recent development spearheaded by the legislative branch in Brazil, the ratification of the law nº 13.985/2019, may aid our recovery efforts too. This law guarantees the placement of psychologists in Brazilian public schools to support students and educators throughout their entire education. The inclusion of psychologists in schools may help educational institutions in the country become “trauma-informed schools” (Lawson et al., 2019) by supporting learning, facilitating the recognition of shared and individual trauma, and prioritizing the promotion of community healing. This certainly constitutes a key mitigation and recovery strategy, and one which may be highly valued by all segments of society as students and educators return to schools and begin to experience the long-term effects of COVID-19 related traumas. This is also an area that merits research consideration: different populations of students across the various dimensions of diversity might have experienced and accumulated different kinds of traumas throughout the course of the pandemic, such as racial trauma and traumas related to household violence. Designing and evaluating interventions to transform schools into communities of healing, trauma-informed institutions in a post-pandemic world may be of paramount importance for scholars and practitioners who aim to challenge systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, and ableism in our schools to build socially just societies and democracies.

Regarding Indigenous knowledge, the loss caused by COVID-19 cannot be underestimated. For Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers who work for and with Indigenous communities, this time also constitutes a delicate moment. In the field of Indigenous research, it would be important to understand how COVID-19 could reinforce historical patterns of disempowerment, potentially undermining reconciliatory efforts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations and the state—especially in Brazil, which has hampered sustainable development and positioned Indigenous communities in precarious conflicts of dispossession over the past few years (Santos et al., 2020). Understanding how Indigenous communities perceive these losses, whether and how educational systems will portray these losses to the public over the years, and how this might affect the forging of respectful relationships in democratic Brazil constitute an area of attention for Indigenous research in the field of education.

Similarly, concerning the construction of a new curriculum-as-plan—the bundles of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students ought to develop and learn through schooling—the pandemic poses opportunities and challenges. As discussed in the main body of this text, curriculum re-prioritization became the terminology that helped Brazilian educational leaders translate learning rights into COVID-19 contextual learning priorities. The development of knowledge and skills is key to expanding freedoms, and so are the timely, complicated conversations that students engage in collectively and independently. Both in and outside of classrooms, student discourse about issues that directly affect their livelihoods, subjective identities, and wellbeing is critical (Pinar, 2019). With constrained learning schedules and additional measures to recover learning losses in a post-pandemic world, understanding how educational leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders negotiate curriculum-as-plan to promote holistic education, and how this negotiation might affect students’ educational experiences, the “curriculum-as-lived” (Aoki et al., 2012), constitutes a site for exploration and interrogation. Indeed, the relevance of schooling and its curriculum-as-plan might be intrinsically linked to these decisions and conversations.

Finally, we comment on the question of learning losses itself. To address losses in knowledge and skills in formal schools, remedial programs will likely merit policy attention during the remaining period of the pandemic and beyond. Because the ramifications of COVID-19 have affected all segments of education and created tight budget constraints, a call for scalability will potentially become a feature of such programs. In this scenario, hybrid modes of instruction may become an attractive option for policymakers, notably in lower and upper secondary levels when more mature students could benefit from these interventions. These programs may aid the offering of regular classes once face-to-face classes resume, especially in cases where educational systems provide services through double-shift schools. These programs may allow students to continue acquiring knowledge and honing skills once children finish regular school hours. Additionally, it may circumvent problems related to space constraints since students may not need to stay in classrooms to participate in hybrid programs. It is pivotal that students who have been historically positioned at-risk benefit from social policies that aim to reduce the opportunity cost from participating in such interventions. Cooperation and coordination between education and social assistance sectors can never be underestimated. For scholars, designing and evaluating the effectiveness of these remedial programs will also constitute an important course of action, for we are now striving to better understand how to institutionalize parameters to mitigate future disruptions and strengthen our risk management systems in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Despite a shaken terrain, seeds of hope are being planted, but germination is also contingent upon the kinds of coalitions and knowledge that we foster and gather to nurture the roots of development as freedom in Brazil and beyond.

Appendix

First measures taken by states in Brazil to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in regards to education activity (1 of 3)

REGION/State	Decree/ Normative instruction	Issue date	Major provisions
NORTHEAST Ceara	Decree n° 33.510	March 16th, 2020	Decrees an emergency health situation and provides for measures to face and contain human infection by the new coronavirus, including the suspension of face-to-face classes for 15 days in all schools, universities and colleges, from public education networks. Mandatory from March 19th, this suspension may also start from March 17th, 2020
Rio Grande do Norte	Decree n° 29.524	March 17th, 2020	Provides for temporary measures to deal with the Public Health Emergency situation caused by the new Coronavirus (COVID-19), suspending classroom activities in public and private schools, within the scope of early childhood education, elementary, high school, higher education, technical and professional education, for the initial period of 15 days
Maranhao	Decree n° 35.662	March 16th, 2020	Provides for the suspension, for 15 days, of face-to-face classes in schools of the state educational network, the State Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Maranhao―IEMA, the State University of Maranhao―UEMA, the State University of Maranhao in the Tocantina Region—UEMASUL, the educational institutions of the municipal networks, as well as in the schools and higher education institutions of the private network located in the State of Maranhao
Piaui	Decree n° 18.884	March 16th, 2020	Regulates Law No. 13,979, of February 6, 2020, to deliberate, within the scope of the State of Piaui, public health emergency measures of international importance taking into account the classification of the new coronavirus as a worldwide pandemic, institutes the Crisis Management Committee, and takes other measures including the suspension, for 15 days, of classes in the state public school system, considered by the school calendar as an anticipation of the school break in the month of July
Paraiba	Normative instrument n° 1	March 17th, 2020	Determines the anticipation of school holidays for the entire state public school system, for the period of March 19th, 2020, to April 18th, 2020 (31 days)
Pernambuco	Decree n° 48.810	March 16th, 2020	Determines, as of March 18th, 2020, the suspension of activities in schools, universities and other educational establishments, public or private, throughout the State of Pernambuco
Bahia	Decree n° 19.529	March 16th, 2020	Regulates, in the State of Bahia, temporary measures to cope with the important public health emergency due to the coronavirus and decrees the suspension of classes for 30 days in the state school system of Salvador, Feira de Santana and Porto Seguro
Alagoas	Decree n° 69.527	March 17th, 2020	Institutes temporary measures to deal with the public health emergency of international importance resulting from the covid-19 (coronavirus), within the scope of the public and private education network in the state of Alagoas, and takes other measures, including the suspension of classes for 15 days from March 23, 2020 onwards
Sergipe	Decree n° 40.560	March 16th, 2020	Provides for the decree of an emergency situation in public health of the State of Sergipe due to the spread of the virus COVID-19 (new coronavirus) and regulates the measures to combat the public health crisis of international importance, under the terms of the Law (Federal) n° 13,979, of February 6th, 2020, suspending educational activities in all schools, universities and colleges, from public and private education networks, for 15 days

First measures taken by states in Brazil to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in regards to education activity (2 of 3)

REGION/State	Decree/ Normative instruction	Issue date	Major provisions
NORTH Amazonas	Decree n° 42.987	March 19th, 2020	Provides for the suspension of classes in the state public school system, for a period of 15 days, in all municipalities of the State of Amazonas, as well as activities of fitness centers and the like, and the river transportation of passengers on boats, except in emergency and urgency cases, in the form specified
Acre	Ordinance SEE n° 764	March 18th, 2020	Establishes temporary measures to be adopted by school units, administrative sectors and education centers of the State Secretariat for Education, Culture and Sports, suspending face-to-face classes at school units in the public state educational network until April 3rd, 2020
Amapa	Decree n° 1.377	March 17th, 2020	Provides for temporary measures to prevent the contagion by the new coronavirus (COVID-19) within the scope of the Executive Branch of the State of Amapa, with classes on the state network suspended for a period of 15 days from the date of March 18, 2020
Tocantins	Decree n° 6071	March 18th, 2020	Due to the COVID-19 pandemic (new Coronavirus), educational activities in public or private educational establishments based in the State of Tocantins, such as schools and universities, are suspended for an indefinite period
Para	Decree n° 609	March 16th, 2020	Provides for measures to combat, within the State of Para, the pandemic of the corona virus (COVID-19), suspending classes in schools within the state public school system until March 31st, 2020, with school lunch offers maintained
Roraima	Decree n° 28.587-E	March 17th, 2020	Provides for measures to deal with the Public Health emergency of international importance resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and ellaborates on other measures, including the suspension of classes, within the scope of the Secretary of States for Education, from March 17th to March 31st, 2020 (15 days), as a way anticipation of school recess, without prejudice to the maintenance of the school calendar recommended by the Ministry of Education
Rondonia	Decree n° 28.871	March 16th, 2020	Decrees an emergency situation in the scope of Public Health and provides for (i) temporary measures to prevent the contagion in the state, and to cope with the spread resulting from the new coronavirus, COVID-19, and (ii) measures concerning the work regime of public and temporary contract servants in the Executive Branch, among other measures, including the suspension of educational activities in all institutions of the public and private education networks, for a period of 15 days, which may be extended for equal periods
MIDWEST Goaias	Technical note	March 15th, 2020	Determines to halt classes, preferably by anticipating school holidays, at all educational levels, public and private, interrupting activities for 15 days, preferably starting on March 16th, 2020, with maximum tolerance up to March 18th, 2020, which may be postponed depending on the assessment of the State’s health authority
Mato Grosso	Decree n° 407	March 16th, 2020	Provides for measures to deal with the public health emergency of international importance resulting from the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to be adopted by the Executive Branch of the State of Mato Grosso including the suspension of classes in the state, municipal and higher education from March 23rd to April 5th (14 days), anticipating school vacation

First measures taken by states in Brazil to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in regards to education activity (3 of 3)

REGION/State	Decree/ Normative instruction	Issue date	Major provisions
Mato Grosso do Sul SOUTHEAST	Decree n° 15.393	March 17th, 2020	Adds article 2°-A to the Decree n° 15.391, of March 16th, 2020, which provides for temporary measures to be adopted, within the scope of the Public Administration of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, to prevent the contagion of COVID-19 in the territory of Mato Grosso do Sul, suspending face-to-face classes in school units and in the centers of the State Education Network of Mato Grosso do Sul, during the period between March 23rd to April 6th, 2020 (15 days)
Sao Paulo	Decree n° 64.862	March 13rd, 2020	Provides for the adoption of temporary and emergency measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (New Coronavirus) and recommendations for the private sector, including the suspension of classes within the scope of the Secretariat of Education and of the Paula Souza Center, gradually establishing, from March 16th to March 23rd, 2020, the adoption of this measure
Rio de Janeiro	Decree n° 46.970	March 13rd, 2020	Provides for temporary measures (i) to prevent the contagion and cope with the spread of the new coronavirus (Covid-19), and (ii) concening the regime of public servants and contractors, as well as other masures, including the suspension of classes, for a period of 15 days, without prejudice to the maintenance of the timetable recommended by the Ministry of Education, in public and private education units, including in higher education units
Minas Gerais Normative Instrument n° 18		March 23rd, 2020	Provides for measures adopted within the scope of the State Education System, as long as the state of PUBLIC CALAMITY lasts due to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspending the activities of basic school education for an indefinite period in all units of the state public school system
Espirito Santo	Decree n° 0378-S	March 16th, 2020	Decrees the measures for coping with the public health emergency resulting from the coronavirus (COVID-19), in the area of education in the State of Espirito Santo, suspending face-to-face classes for 15 days starting on March 23rd, 2020
SOUTH Parana	Decree n° 4.230	March 16th, 2020	Decrees that face-to-face classes in public and private state schools, including entities affiliated with the State of Parana, and in public universities, will be suspended from March 20, 2020 for an indefinite period
Santa Catarina	Decree n° 509	March 17th, 2020	Continues the progressive adoption of measures to prevent and combat contagion by the coronavirus (COVID-19) in entities of the Direct and Indirect State Public Administration and establishes other measures, including the suspension of classes in the units of the public and private networks of education, municipal, state and federal (including early childhood education, elementary school, high school, youth and adult education (EJA), technical education and higher education) for 30 days, from March 19th, 2020
Rio Grande do Sul	Decree n° 55118	March 16th, 2020	Establishes complementary measures to prevent contagion of the new Coronavirus within the State, decreeing the suspension of face-to-face classes within the State Education System as of March 19th, 2020, for a period of 15 days, extendable Establishes the suspension, within the scope of the Federal
FEDERAL DISTRICT	Decree n° 40.520	March 14th, 2020	District, for a period of 15 days starting on March 16th, 2020.: III—educational activities in all schools, universities and colleges, of the public and private education networks, which should be understood as school recess/vacations in the month of July

Sample of research conducted in Brazil describing Covid-19 effects on the Educational Sector

March-July2020

Research title	Main month of organizer(s) publication		Sample & Data collection	Contents	Some important findings
Feelings and Instituto March perceptions of Peninsula 2020 Brazilian teachers in different stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. See bibliography for link: Instituto Peninsula (2020)			2400 educators across Brazil answered survey, of which	(i) Caracterization of status-quo in face of school closures; (ii) teachers’ perceptions of their role during the pandemic; (iii) activities to promote self-care and wellness; and (iv) teaching routines and habits	(i) Identitifed female teachers seemed to be more worried about their health than their male conterparts. (ii) 60% of private school educators stated that their main role was to engage with students remotely compared to 32.5 and 43.1% of educators in municipal and state public schools
Education Rui Barbosa Institute’s Cannot Wait Technical Educational Project Committee, Iede (Evidence and Interdisciplinary in Educational Debates), 22 state courts of account, and four municipal courts of account See bibliography for link: Faria et al. (2020)		June 2020	232 municipal and 17 state secretariats of education answered two surveys and participated in in-depth interviews via phone	(i) Employed pedagogical practices during the pandemic; (ii) teacher performance; (iii) orientation to caregivers and parents; (iv) planning for returnal; and (v) distribution of goods/groceries to families	(i) Of all municipal secretariats, 27 and 25% affirmed that no strategy was currently in place to offer pedagogical support to students during the pandemic in the North/Northeast regions of Brazil. All municipal secretariats in the South/Southeast regions affirmed that offerings were available, however. (ii) Of all municipal secretariats, 93% of them affirmed that pedagogical interventions were aligned with BNCC. (iii) 84% of all municipal secretariats were preparing to resume classes
Youth and the National Council of Youth Covid-19 (CONJUVE), Em Pandemic Movimento, Roberto Marinho Foundation, Mapa Educagao, Rede Conheci- mento Social, Visao Mundial, UNESCO. See bibliography for link: National Council of Youth (2020)		June 2020	33.688 youth answered survey across Brazil, of which (i) 33, 66 and 1% self-identified as male, female and non-binary, and (ii) 46, 38, 14 and 1% self-identified as White, Brown, Black, and Indigenous, respectively	(i) Pandemic effects on youth’s habits; (ii) the relationship between pandemic effects and youth’s education, work, economic status, and health conditions, and (iii) youth’s future perspectives	(i) 78% of White youth accessed the internet via computer, compared to 54% of Brown and Black youth. (ii) Disparities regarding feelings between female and male respondents, e.g. 50% of male-bodied individuals stated that they felt anxious compared to 67% of female counterparts, and 41% of male-bodied compared to 53% female-bodied responded that they felt frightened
Distance Education, Waves 1, 2 & 3	Imaginable Futures, Lemann Foundation, Itau Social, Datafolha	June & July 2020	Wave 1: Non face-to-face education— 1.028 interviews with legal guardians, representing a sample of 1.518 students Wave 2: Non face-to-face education from the perspectives of students and families—1.028 interviews with legal guardians, representing a sample of 1.518 students	(i) Access and realization of schooling activities; (ii) challenges faced by students; (iii) and guardians’ perceptions on schools’ support systems, possibility of dropouts, etc. Same as above	(i) 82% of students who receive activities complete them. (ii) Time to complete activities is greater in ISCED levels 2 and 3. (iii) Those who received print activities spent less time on them. (iv) 47% did not receive orientations from schools. In Isced level 3, this figure grows to 69%. (iv) 46% consider that students are not motivated (i) increased leack of motivation, from 46 to 53%. (ii) 87% are afraid that students get infected with the new coronavirus once schools resume classes. (iii) 62% of guardians are in touch with teachers
See bibliography for link: Data Folha et al. (2020a, b, c)			Wave 3: Non face-to-face education from the perspectives of students and families, representing a sample of 1.518 students	Same as above	(i) Increased leack of motivation, from 46 to 51%. (ii) Difficulties with studying routines increased from 58 to 67% between May and July. (iii) The percentage of parents who are concerned that children will dropouts increased from 31 to 38%