1970-01-01 02:00:00
The Tarcísio de Freitas government (Republicans) changed a rule so that students have their enrollment canceled in state schools in São Paulo if they register absences for 15 consecutive days without justification.
The resolution, signed by Secretary Renato Feder and published on July 7 in the Official State Gazette, changes the previous rule. Before, enrollment was only canceled from the system if the student did not attend school in the first 15 school days. With the new rule, cancellation can occur at any time of the year.
In a note, the Department of Education said that the resolution “aims to identify the absence of students more quickly and enable measures to be taken before the student leaves school for good”.
The folder said that the resolution complements the “series of actions of the folder for the absent student to return to the classroom”. “It is important to point out that Seduc guarantees that, at any time, every student can enter or return to the state education network”, he declared.
Also according to the folder, the cancellation of registration only occurs after exhausting all active search procedures, which would be “telephone contact, face-to-face contact, letter and email”.
“In the previous model, dropout was only known at the end of the school year and Non-Attendance could be registered without justifications about the non-attendance of students. Now, it is mandatory that in all the registration of “Non-Attendance” the school informs whether or not the active search”, said the secretariat.
For specialists, the measure restricts the basic right to education, guaranteed by the Constitution and by the LDB (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases). In addition to leaving vulnerable students even more helpless, since, when they are no longer included in the system, they become “invisible” to the protection system. The resolution does not say whether schools should contact the Tutelary Council before canceling registration.
They also claim that the change could artificially improve the Ideb (Basic Education Development Index), which is calculated by combining student performance in a test and school approval rates.
With students more likely to fail or drop out of the system, the São Paulo state network tends to have a higher indicator. The measure causes the secretariat to “hide” the students who would be counted as students who failed due to absences, that is, dropped out of school, and which would cause the result of the indicator to be lower.
The change in the rule applies to elementary, high school and EJA (Youth and Adult Education) students throughout the state’s public school system. According to the resolution, throughout the year, the registration of NCOM (non-attendance) may be launched for students who “did not obtain an attendance record in the last 15 consecutive school days, without justification, after exhausting the active search procedures”.
The text also says that the school must present the “supporting documents of the Active Search actions” in the medical record of the student who is disconnected from the system. The resolution, however, does not define what these actions should be and when they can be considered “exhausted”.
The new rule also differs from what determines the LDB, which says that the approval of the Tutelary Council is necessary for the dismissal of a student when evasion exceeds 10% of school days, that is 20 days. Permission to cancel enrollment after 15 days represents only 7.5% of the school year.
For Ocimar Alavarse, professor at the Faculty of Education at USP, the measure can be considered illegal, since it is the duty of schools and the education system to ensure that every child and adolescent, from 4 to 17 years old, attends school.
“It is a drastic and wrong measure, because the Department of Education is absent from its obligation to actively search for students. If that student is not in school, the obligation to go after him is not only the school unit, but the whole the system,” he says.
“If the school’s actions were not enough to bring the student back, it is the department’s obligation to find ways for this search to be successful. The department cannot simply exclude the student from the system”, he concludes.
The State Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the change in the rule to investigate “possible damage to educational rights”.
Tarcísio’s Secretary of Education, Renato Feder, since taking office, has announced a series of actions on the grounds of improving school attendance in the state. In addition to determining the use of an application to record student attendance, he announced that the attendance rate will be used to calculate bonuses for teachers.
He took charge of the secretariat with the promise that the state network of São Paulo will reach the highest Ideb in the country. The first place in the indicator for secondary education is now occupied by Paraná, where Feder was secretary and in which he also adopted a series of measures to improve school attendance, including instituting a rule that allowed the removal of directors from units with many absences .
“The concern with school attendance is important, but the actions must be to guarantee the actual presence of students in school. It cannot be just a concern with the attendance indicator”, says Salomão Ximenes, professor of public policies at UFABC.
“A child or young person leaves school because they are in a vulnerable situation. By just canceling enrollment, the secretary leaves that student at social risk.”
Specialists also point out that the school pass rate is an important component in the calculation of the Ideb and is used precisely to avoid distortions in the evaluation of education systems. In addition to being used to assess whether the right of access to education is being guaranteed.
“With the exclusion of that student from the system, the indicator will not account for that student dropping out of school or failing. That is, there may be an artificial increase in the indicator”, says Alavarse, who specializes in educational evaluation.
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