By Bianca Oliveira
SAO PAULO – Brazil has completed a year since presential classes were suspended and schools closed to contain the pandemic. The measure extended throughout the academic year 2020 and, even today, the future of education is uncertain, as with the new wave of cases from Covid-19 schools across the country have closed again.
The socioeconomic impacts of the closure of schools were mapped by the Economic Policy Secretariat (SPE), of the Ministry of Economy, in the MacroFiscal Bulletin released on Wednesday (17). According to the report, the effects of this gap in education “should last for approximately 15 years after the end of the pandemic, until students who are suffering from the interruption of classes enter the labor market. Therefore, schools closed today cause a poorer country tomorrow. And that tomorrow should last for almost two decades”.
The World Bank also released a report on the interruption of presential education in Latin America and the Caribbean, saying that the situation can raise learning poverty by more than 20%, in the case of Brazil that already recorded serious inequalities before the crisis, this number can reach 70% of all students.
The country opted for the complete closure of public schools for a much longer period than that registered in other countries. On average, there were 40 weeks of interruption in Brazil, against 22 weeks in the rest of the world. The suspension also affected the food of the poorest students, who depend on school lunch boxes, and increased the dropout rate of students who faced difficulties such as lack of internet access to attend classes.
The difficulties imposed by the pandemic caused 4 million Brazilian students, aged between 6 and 34, to drop out of school last year. As a result, the dropout rate reached 8.4% in 2020, according to a C6 Bank/Datafolha survey. Among those who stopped studying last year, 17.4% have no intention of returning in 2021.
The SPE notes that the negative impact of the pandemic on student learning is not homogeneous in the population because the barriers to remote education are higher for low-income families.