Brazil. How Two Municipalities Achieved Above-Average Results in Reading in the Early Years of Elementary School During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This chapter discusses the impacts of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ reading development in the early years of elementary school in Brazil and analyzes educational policies that may have mitigated part of these effects. The research focuses on reading assessments carried out in 2021 by CAEd/UFJF and Associação Bem Comum in ten Brazilian states. Although the assessments revealed major challenges for students’ literacy in many states, some municipalities managed to mitigate part of the effects of the pandemic, achieving above-average results. Two municipalities that reached rates of fluent students in reading higher than the average were selected for survey and analysis: Machados-PE and Coruripe-AL. This paper examines the public policies of these networks to identify and understand the actions that contributed to their unique performance in the assessment.

Brazilian Context and Pandemic Impacts on Literacy

Brazil was one of the most affected countries by the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2022, the country registered more than 680,000 deaths caused by the coronavirus, second only to the United States (WHO, 2022). The high rate of contamination and deaths led schools to interrupt their face-to-face activities for long periods. This, along with a lack of coordination by the Federal Government, caused Brazil to suffer hugely negative impacts on public education in addition to the devastating loss of human life.

In March 2020, when cases of COVID-19 began to grow in Brazil, most state and municipal education networks interrupted their classroom activities and migrated to remote teaching. During this period, each Education Department adopted their own COVID response policies with little support from the Ministry of Education. This resulted in discrepancies between response effectiveness in larger, wealthier districts and smaller municipalities with less resources. Networks like São Paulo and Pernambuco were able to develop teaching platforms and distribute electronic devices to their students in a timely manner while others lacked the necessary support and access to technology needed to implement distance learning (Amâncio, 2020; Soares, 2020). Although some districts attempted to return to in-person learning in the last months of 2020, schools in Brazil did not reopen across state and municipal networks until the second half of 2021. Therefore, most Brazilian schools were totally or partially closed for more than a year.

The negative impacts of such a long period of distance learning without federal coordination, in a country with so many social inequalities, have been speculated. There is evidence of a greater impact in the early years of elementary school, compared to the final years and high school. In the initial stage of schooling, children have less autonomy to study and learn, requiring a closer presence and monitoring teachers, which was not possible during most of 2020 and part of 2021.

In March 2021, the Center for Public Policies and Education Assessment of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (CAEd/UFJF) carried out the first Brazilian pandemic impact survey on basic education, through an assessment applied to a sample of students from fifth and ninth grades of elementary school and third grade of high school, in São Paulo State Education Department. The survey confirms that the initial years tend to have been more affected, revealing a greater distance, for the fifth year of elementary school, between students who started the 2021 academic year and those who were concluding in 2019.

Table 2.1 presents the data from this survey regarding proficiency in Portuguese. For a better understanding of these numbers, Table 2.2 outlines the proficiency standard ranges.

Table 2.1 Portuguese proficiency comparison in 2019 national assessment and in the 2021 sample survey in São Paulo Education Department

Table 2.2 Performance standards of the São Paulo assessment system for Portuguese

According to the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), students must complete their initial literacy in the second year of elementary school to be consolidated and deepened in the following years (Brasil, 2017). A drop in Portuguese learning in the initial years of schooling can make students complete the first cycle of elementary school without attaining proper literacy, given that many districts adopted automatic approval of student matriculation during the pandemic.

Fluency is a fundamental dimension of literacy acquisition. Students are identified as fluent when they can read a developmentally appropriate text without major difficulties, enabling them to understand and interpret the content’s meaning. The inability to gain literacy without fluency has given it greater prominence in large-scale educational assessments seeking to monitor the effectiveness of public policies for developmentally appropriate literacy benchmarks.

Between August and October 2021, CAEd/UFJF, together with Associação Bem Comum, applied a census-based fluency assessment to second year elementary school students from state and municipal schools in ten Brazilian states: Alagoas, Amapá, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Maranhão, Pernambuco, Piauí, and Sergipe. The results confirmed the impact in the early years of elementary school already pointed out by the sample survey in São Paulo: more than 72% of students were in the Pre-Reader profile, which corresponds to the lowest standard of reading development.

By way of comparison, in 2019, CAEd/UFJF applied the same type of reading fluency assessment in four of these states and identified approximately 54% of students as Pre-Readers. The states that participated in this 2019 assessment were Amapá, Espírito Santo, Pernambuco, and Sergipe. If we consider only these states in 2021, we verify that the result is almost identical to that of the ten states: around 73% (Graphs 2.1 and 2.2).

Graph 2.1

Distribution of students by reader profile in ten Brazilian states in the 2021 reading fluency assessment. (Source: CAEd/UFJF, 2021)

Graph 2.2

Comparison between the percentage of students in the Pre-Reader profile among the four states that participated in the reading fluency assessment in 2019 and 2021 – Amapá, Espírito Santo, Pernambuco, and Sergipe. (There are some methodological differences between the two assessments. In 2019, there was also a profile referring to students who were unable to do any type of reading, which was below Pre-Readers. In 2021, there was no such division. Therefore, to make the comparison possible, students who were not able to do any reading in the 2019 assessment were included in the Pre-Reader profile. Source: CAEd/UFJF, 2021)

What does an increasing literacy gap mean for student learning? To understand better, this paper will define exactly what reading fluency is and how it presents itself in each = three reader profiles: Pre-Reader, Beginner Reader, and Fluent Reader.

Reading Fluency and Its Assessment

As we have already mentioned, the development of reading fluency refers to the ability to read a text without having to try to recognize the words, in such a way that the effort in reading is focused on understanding its content. For this to be possible, it is necessary to master three fundamental aspects of this process: precision, automaticity, and prosody. Precision is related to a student’s ability to correctly identify written words so that graphic signals are converted into sound signals. It is only possible to achieve good reading accuracy if there is a full mastery of the alphabetic principle and competence to articulate combinations of sounds. The second aspect, automaticity, concerns the fluidity of the reading process. In addition to being accurate in its reading, it is necessary for students to do it at the appropriate time, without great effort -that is, automatically. Finally, prosody is a term used to describe the tonic and rhythmic aspects of speech. Emphasizing terms properly, raising and lowering one’s voice in appropriate places, using interrogative intonation in a question or imperative in an exclamation, are all skills associated with prosody.

According to Rasinski (2004), fluency is the bridge between decoding and understanding texts. It cannot be confused with decoding, as it is precisely the process through which decoding begins to produce different meanings for the reader (Chard et al., 2006). Therefore, it is essential that fluency is consolidated and automated so that the student can perform a reading in which they do not spend cognitive effort on word recognition processes, but on strategies for building meaning of and in the text. Borges da Silva (2018) highlights that to be an efficient reader, the student must be able to instantly recognize and identify words and then connect them into sentences to produce meaning. In the same way, Rasinski (2006) points to the close relationship between fluency and comprehension: the greater the fluency in reading, the greater the understanding of what is read. Therefore, identifying the degree to which students in the literacy process can read fluently is extremely relevant, as it is a fundamental indicator of how close they are to completing their initial literacy.

The reading fluency assessment conducted by CAEd/UFJF and Associação Bem Comum verifies a student’s ability to read sets of dictionary and invented words - called pseudowords – , automatically and accurately, in each time frame. Students are then asked to answer questions related to the content of a short text.¹ The student’s reading is recorded for later analysis by a teacher, who will identify the performance as a Pre-Reader, Beginner Reader, or Fluent Reader. In order to improve the accuracy of literacy intervention within these reading levels, the Pre-Reader category is divided into six different levels of development. This makes it possible to verify how much each student still needs to progress to advance to the next profile. Table 2.3 presents a brief description of each of these profiles in the context of the CAEd/UFJF reading fluency assessment.

Table 2.3 Description and detailing of reader profiles in the reading fluency assessment

Based on these definitions, a student who is still in the Pre-Reader profile, from the first to the sixth level, will have great difficulties interacting with any type of text. If students do not advance beyond the Pre-Reader stage by the end of their second year of elementary school, their learning will be severely impacted, as reading practice is a fundamental condition to develop new skills and successfully advance over time. The results of these 2021 fluency assessments point to a challenging situation in the post-pandemic context: more than 72% of students in the Pre-Reader category were about to finish their second year of elementary school reading no or just a few words. One can imagine the challenges that these children will face if they are promoted, under these conditions, to the next school grades, in which they will have to deal with more complex texts and of diversified genres.

To prevent an entire generation of children from having their education compromised and their normal development disrupted, managers, school principals, and teachers need to advance efficient literacy policies and practices focused on the early years of elementary school. A look at education departments that achieved above-average performance on this 2021 reading fluency assessment can be a good starting point to identify which practices were effective. We selected two municipal education departments that stood out in the 2021 fluency reading assessment: Coruripe, in the state of Alagoas, and Machados, in Pernambuco. The following sections of this paper will address the profile of these two networks, their performance indicators, and the policies and strategies that we consider partly responsible for their achievements.

Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE) Educational Indicators

Although Coruripe and Machados are both small education networks, their significant differences in the number of enrollments must be considered throughout our analysis. Machados is a municipality located just over 107 km from Recife, capital of Pernambuco, and has a population of approximately 16,000 inhabitants (IBGE, 2020). According to the 2021 School Census, the education system includes 12 schools - 8 rural and 4 urban- with a total of almost 2000 students (INEP, 2021a). Coruripe is a municipality on the coast of Alagoas, located just over 87 km from the capital of Maceió, with a population of over 57,000 inhabitants (IBGE, 2020). The 2021 School Census indicated that the education system includes 20 school units- 13 rural and 7 urban - which serve approximately 13,500 students (INEP, 2021b). In the early years of basic education, we found above-average results for Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL) in the 2021 reading fluency assessment in the second year of elementary school, and in the historical series of the National Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb) Portuguese assessment given in the fifth year of elementary school. Graphs 2.3 and 2.4, and 2.5 present Portuguese and reading indicators in each municipality as compared to state and national averages.

Graphs 2.3 and 2.4

Distribution of students by reader profile in Coruripe (AL), compared to the state average, Alagoas, and in Machados (PE), compared to the state average, Pernambuco, in the reading fluency assessment – second year of elementary school – 2021. (Source: CAEd/UFJF, 2021).

Graph 2.5

Percentage of students in the municipal networks of Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE) with an adequate (In this case, “adequate” considers the Adequate and Advanced performance standards proposed by Soares (2009) for the Saeb proficiency scale. Therefore, in the 5th year of elementary school, for Portuguese, performances above 200 points on the Saeb scale are considered adequate) standard of performance in Portuguese in Saeb, compared to the average of municipal networks in Brazil – fifth year of elementary school - 2015, 2017 and 2019. (Source: INEP, 2020)

The above-average performance of Coruripe (AL) and Mchados (PE) on more than one assessment in the early years of elementary school, in different formats and applied at different times, leads us to conclude that these two networks have successfully implemented public policies that mitigated literacy lost during the pandemic. Although the reading fluency assessment results in the second year of elementary school, in Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE), were negatively impacted by the pandemic, their unique performance above state averages shows that these networks were able to overcome some of the pandemic challenges and promote more efficient literacy acquisition for their students. When observing the performance of these same networks at Saeb, we notice that in 2017 and 2019, Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE) made significant progress in Portuguese in the fifth year of elementary school. This thesis is reinforced when we verify that the two selected networks do not belong to privileged socioeconomic contexts, which highlights the role of educational policies implemented in recent times. When we analyze the social indicators, we see that Machados (PE) has a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.578, considered low, while Coruripe (AL) has an HDI of 0.626, considered medium (PNUD, 2010). In addition, both municipalities are at Level III of the Socioeconomic Level Index (Inse), below the national average of IV (INEP, 2021a).

We have presented the definition and importance of reading fluency in the literacy process and for student development. We also showed how this dimension of learning was impacted during the period of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic with students from the second year of elementary school. At the same time, municipalities such as Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL) managed to overcome some obstacles and achieve results well above the general average. The next section examines the public policies that contributed to the relatively high performance of both networks.

Public Policies in Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL)

To survey and analyze the public policies of Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL) education networks, we interviewed professionals from the education departments² of both municipalities. The research focused on educational managers, who according to the specialized literature make up the so-called middle-level bureaucracy (Cavalcante & Lotta, 2015). These actors and institutions from subnational levels of government gain central importance, especially in the Brazilian federative context, from the broad decentralization of most public educational policies (Oliveira & Abrucio, 2018). They are professionals who act as a link between education secretaries who make policy decisions and those who implement educational policies – in general, teachers and school principals. By acting as an intermediary, education managers occupy a prominent role in the development and implementation of public policies - requiring them to have both technical and political expertise (Cavalcante & Lotta, 2015, p. 32–33). These professionals manage plans, put actions into practice, and negotiate with different – and sometimes conflicting – demands of the central administration of the district and the school. In fact, one of the policies that we identified in the two municipalities as fundamental for achieving good results was the system of monitoring and supporting schools through constant visits, which is only possible thanks to the work of these professionals who work between districts and schools.

There are three public policies that we consider fundamental to the success of the education departments of Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL): (1) system of monitoring and supporting schools; (2) assessments; and (3) tutoring classes. We will detail how each of these policies occurs in the two networks, highlighting their commonalities and the way they were adapted during the remote and hybrid learning periods of the pandemic. At the same time, we will seek to show how these three policies are strongly articulated with each other.

System of Monitoring and Supporting Schools

Coruripe

The school network in Coruripe (AL) is divided into three regions. Each one has a manager responsible for administrative and pedagogical support to schools. These managers work in partnership with the department’s pedagogical coordinators and technicians, who visit the schools together. The department’s pedagogical coordinators play an important role in support of teaching and learning: in the early years of elementary school, the Department has a specific coordinator for the first and second year, and another that takes care of the third to fifth year.

We observed two complementary ways that monitoring and supporting schools occurs in Coruripe (AL). First, these professionals visit schools every two weeks, each equipped with their own instrument - a script of topics to be addressed and methods for systematization of the information obtained. During these visits, the manager and technicians work with school principals to address administrative matters, while the Department’s pedagogical coordinator engages in issues related to teachers. The free movement of the Department’s pedagogical coordinator within the schools - entering classrooms, attending classes, and interacting with students - is received well by teachers and seems to us to be a fundamental point for the success of this monitoring system.

In countries like the United States, the visit of a professional from the Department inside classrooms is not usually faced with much resistance. In Data Wise: A Step-By-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning, this is considered an important way of monitoring pedagogical intervention practices, which can be done either by someone from the Department or by the school principal (Boudett et al., 2013). Depending on the context, in Brazil the practice can be seen as undue intrusion; however, education Departments that successfully establish a follow-up routine like this tend to achieve positive results. A famous and successful Brazilian example is the Literacy Program at the Right Age (PAIC) in Ceará, which has this type of professional who visits schools and enters classrooms to support teachers in their literacy instruction (Burgos et al., 2019; Bonamino et al., 2019).

The instrument that the Department’s pedagogical coordinator uses when visiting schools has 20 items that are checked during their observations in the school as a whole and within classrooms. Items on the list include:

• Are teachers and pedagogical coordinators present and fulfilling their role?

• Are classes taking place according to the lesson plan?

• Is there evidence that the school diagnoses and monitors student learning?

• Are the students’ learning levels in accordance with what is observed in the assessments?

• Is there a lack of discipline that enables situations that could compromise learning?

• Are classes organized according to student learning levels?

• Is the school principal engaged? Is there a climate of cooperation among other professionals and with parents and guardians?

• Is the school’s pedagogical political project³ being put into practice?

• Does the school manage the attendance of students?

• Is feedback from the Department being considered in the school routine?

• Does the school carry out actions to overcome learning gaps and support students with disabilities?

Department visits help schools solve eventual problems, reinforce the bonds between the Department and the unit, and enable educational evaluations to align with the constant observation of the school routine.

Another form of monitoring in Coruripe (AL), which is through the application of evaluation sheets to students every two months. These sheets are prepared by education managers and pedagogical coordinators and serve as a formative assessment applied by the teachers and later returned to the Department for analysis. Results are then consolidated and sent back to the school for internal discussion and with the Department’s team.

Taking a closer look at the instrument used to consolidate the results of bi-monthly assessments demonstrates how strongly linked monitoring and assessment policies are in Coruripe. The instrument for consolidating information from Portuguese assessments in early elementary school records the name of each student in relation to their level of reading: “Does not read,” “Reads with difficulty,” and “Reads fluently.” Although the first two reader profile nomenclatures are different, there is an evident alignment between this bimonthly monitoring and the external reading fluency assessment. After diagnosing the student’s reader profile, the instrument indicates whether the child has already developed a series of progressive BNCC skills of reading, orality, and textual production. Of these three, reading receives the most attention in the second year of elementary school cards. Reading skills range from the identification of alphabet letters to the identification of the social function of a text.

Machados

The Machados (PE) education department also uses a monitoring system, which they call the Itinerant Department program. Although like Coruripe (AL) in many ways, Machados (PE) is a network with fewer schools, a smaller Department team, and no division by management. In this sense, the person who performs the role of secretary of education is usually present on visits to schools, along with the Department’s director of education, pedagogical coordinator, and some technicians. The frequency of visits is also, on average, every 15 days.The script used in Machados (PE) is quite like that of Coruripe (AL), with the secretary of education, the direction of education, and technicians fulfilling a more administrative role, and the department’s pedagogical coordinator providing more support to the teachers by visiting classrooms. According to the interviews, the Machados teachers welcome visits from the Department’s pedagogical coordinator. In both Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL), this professional is usually someone who has also worked as a teacher in the network, so he/she is not seen only as a bureaucrat and therefore not an “intruder.” The fact that Machados (PE) is a small municipality, with just over 16,000 inhabitants, means that professionals from the Department and the schools often have some relationship or proximity beyond the educational context. This familiarity tends to facilitate communication and coexistence across the district. In larger networks, this work may require greater preparation to break teachers’ resistance to what they may regard as excessive oversight rather than support.

According to the interviews, all projects developed by the educational department in Machados (PE) are based on the investigation carried out on school visits and in assessments. This is an important point for projects to be aligned with school demands, as well as for teachers to feel represented in the policies and actions proposed by the Department. Like Coruripe (AL), Machados (PE) also has bimonthly assessment tests; however, they are prepared by teachers instead of education managers. Although they serve to monitor and support student learning, these tests are not included in the Itinerant Department program.

Commonalities

In both Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL), the pandemic may have contributed to a greater inclusion of family members in the monitoring and support system conducted by the Department, so that the demands and contexts of the students’ families are also included in the process. This is especially important for literacy policies in the early years of elementary school, a stage in which it is known that family support tends to have a greater impact on learning, given the students’ lack of autonomy. During the period of remote and hybrid teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, monitoring had to be adapted to a virtual format through meetings and exchanges of messages via mobile application. Given the impossibility of visiting classrooms, schools in Machados (PE) sent a portfolio to the Department each month detailing the actions developed and including data on student attendance in remote classes. This information was used to direct the Department’s support to schools during remote teaching. Increased contact between the department and students’ families during the pandemic period was highlighted as a positive change in both districts, mainly through groups of message exchanges via mobile app. Although not all parents and guardians had access to internet-enabled cell phones, those who had access strengthened ties with the school while the others received constant home visits from the Department.

Assessments

The Machados (PE) Department has its own formative assessment, applied twice a year, called Municipal Assessment of School Performance (AMDE). In addition, the Department participates in external assessments outside the network, such as the Saeb national assessment, the Pernambuco Educational Assessment System (SAEPE) and the assessment of reading fluency. Machados (PE) also has a bimonthly test, applied internally by teachers, that adopts the format of an external assessment. Coruripe (AL), in turn, applies its own formative assessment three times a year, in addition to the bimonthly evaluation sheets. Furthermore, the network participates in the Saeb national assessment and the Prova Alagoas, applied by the state.

Our analysis of the strategies of the two Departments in relation to educational assessment identified the standardization of applied tests as an important point of success. Although this can be an object of criticism, seen as an instrument that is not capable of evaluating more sophisticated student learning, standardization facilitates the analysis of results and aligns information across the network. For example, when teachers start to prepare tests according to their own criteria, the results may prove inconsistent. This makes it difficult to diagnose trends and outliers in the process of trying to understand the state of learning across the district.

The results do not discourage teachers from assessing students within their specific classroom contexts; however, what stands out is the importance of standardized information based on student learning and complemented by the specifics of each class.For example, although teachers in Machados (PE) prepare, apply, and correct the district’s bimonthly tests, they always follow a pre-established format and base the skill matrix on the state’s evaluation system to ensure continuity across schools. In turn, formative assessments, which happens twice in Machados (PE) and three times in Coruripe (AL), are carried out either by the Department itself or by a contracted institution that guarantees the standardization of the process, also based on the skills matrix of their state’s assessment systems.

Another fundamental point, already highlighted, is the articulation between assessments and Department visits to schools. In both municipalities, it was noted that the visit itself is, in a way, an evaluation - either through observation and recording of school routine and student participation in the classroom, or through the application of evaluation sheets by the Department’s pedagogical coordinator. These actions are important to, first, compare assessment results with what is observed to enrich the educational performance indicators; and, secondly, to promote the discussion of the results between teachers and school principals. We know that the appropriation of results is usually a challenge in Brazilian assessment systems. When Department education managers go to schools with consolidated and analyzed data to promote presentations and discussions, a good part of this difficulty is already overcome through the introduction of student performance indicators in the daily life of the school.

Finally, our interviews with managers from Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL) reveal the importance of having structured teaching materials that are aligned with assessments. In the specific case of Machados (PE), the network prepares activities based on the Saeb and SAEPE skills so that teachers have the possibility of leading activities based on the skill matrix of these assessments throughout the school year. It should be noted, however, that these matrices should not replace the network’s curriculum, but rather be seen as a cut of essential skills that can be measured in standardized tests.

Machados (PE) also has a fortnightly program of didactic sequences and projects, proposed by the Department according to what is observed during visits to schools and in the assessment results. Most of the didactic sequences and projects focus on reading so that in the early years they function as a literacy program, which can be adapted and improved by the schools as long as the Department is notified.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale assessments were interrupted throughout the most acute period of social isolation. As a result, the focus turned to more flexible assessments, which relied on greater teacher participation. Although Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE) already applied their own formative assessments, the pandemic reinforced the need for an instrument that allows for flexible application and increased teacher participation in standardized testing to increase school engagement and wider use of results.

Tutoring Classes

To close the cycle of monitoring student learning and supporting teaching, the Departments of Machados (PE) and Coruripe (AL) offer tutoring programs to their students throughout the school year. In both municipalities, the selection of students is linked to their results on the different assessments they participated in. Progress monitoring is then used to verify the effectiveness of tutoring sessions over the course of the school year. In Machados (PE), tutoring is offered during regular school hours and taught by network assistants called monitors, who are teachers specifically hired for the tutoring classes. Students from different grades are regrouped outside their classroom according to their reading performance level, so that they receive literacy reinforcement from the monitors for approximately 1h30min everyday. As their performance progresses, the students change groups, until they reach the learning expected for their grades and no longer need to go through these tutoring classes. In Coruripe (AL), tutoring classes are offered after school hours, which can take place in the morning or in the afternoon, so that the school space is organized in a way that both regular teaching and tutoring can take place simultaneously, using vacant rooms and laboratories. These classes are no mandatory, but an effort is made to improve participation: for example, they are a requirement for students who are interested in after-school sports. Unlike Machados (PE), the teachers who offer tutoring in Coruripe (AL) are, for the most part, the same ones who already teach during regular school time. They receive an extra allowance per hour of class given in addition to what is required in their contract and are able to take up to 4 classes of tutoring in a shift.

In addition to the positive impact on student learning, managers in both districts reported a reinforcement of student and family ties with the school, combating irregular attendance and school dropout. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Machados (PE) Department pointed out a greater difficulty in executing the tutoring classes program. In both municipalities, it was observed that the program gained more strength with the return of face-to-face classes, usually preceded by evaluations, to verify the impact of the remote teaching period on the learning of each student.

Conclusions

Interviews with school managers in Coruripe (AL) and Machados (PE) indicated that the above-average results on national and state assessments achieved by both municipalities in Portuguese and reading in the early years of elementary school, in national and state assessments, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, are not the result of one specific program, but of a well-structured and sustainable network with years of operation that articulates monitoring and school support through assessments and tutoring.

This constant cycle of monitoring and school support allowed the Department to (1) always be close to schools and know what is happening inside them; (2) gain and retain the trust of teachers and school principals so that they can provide effective support and intervention whenever necessary; and (3) develop projects and actions according to the reality of schools direct needs of their students. In both networks, the retention of the Department’s technical staff, regardless of changes in administration, has allowed policies to be maintained, improved, and consolidated.

Although there is evidence that school monitoring has been an effective policy across both Departments, its greatest effects have been recorded in the early years of elementary school. At this school stage, the Department’s pedagogical coordinators find it easier to enter the classroom, interact with students, and identify the main problems in accordance with the specific characteristics of the skills and content taught in each grade. Our analysis suggests that for final years and high school, we believe that this type of monitoring and support would need to be adapted to produce the same positive effects.

The characteristics and conditions that we described and analyzed made it possible for these two municipalities to overcome some of the obstacles imposed by the emergency and atypical period of the 2020–2021 period. The COVID-19 pandemic immensely affected all education networks in Brazil; however, better structured Departments with sustainable policies, and positive results on assessments were able to mitigate part of these losses and promote a more successful recomposition of learning in the post-pandemic period.