What the US can teach Brazil about the implementation of the curriculum base

The challenges for the implementation of a single curriculum standard. In Brazil, content regulation by grade level can take effect from 2019. In the USA, where the initiative dates from 2010, lack of teacher training, inadequate teaching materials and political disputes are the main obstacles.

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The current scenario of Brazilian education is very reminiscent of that of the United States of 2010. That year, then-President Barack Obama, billionaire Bill Gates, governors and teachers' unions were betting that a rigorous and unprecedented national curriculum would place the country's students among the best international appraisals of learning. Obama would invest about $ 1 billion in the idea, one of the largest federal education programs in American history. The founder of Microsoft would distribute $ 200 million. States ruled by Democrats and Republicans would voluntarily incorporate politics. Seven years after the release, imagined success has not yet come to fruition - and there is doubt whether it will ever happen. The situation serves as an alert for Brazil, which is preparing to adopt the National Curricular Joint Base (BNCC). In nations with smaller populations, such as Australia, Singapore and Portugal, curricula have been successful. For many researchers, however, it is more appropriate to compare Brazil with the US. Both are continental and federated countries (states with autonomy) that coexist with educational and regional inequalities. The American document, called Common Core, establishes the set of skills that students must have in each grade, from pre-school to high school. At least in theory, standardizing education allows greater collaboration between states and facilitates comparisons between them.

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They are objectives similar to those of Brazil. Last month, the Michel Temer government (PMDB) launched its curriculum base, with broad support from states, municipalities and private foundations. The ceremony was attended by managers of the Dilma Rousseff administration (PT), in a demonstration of supra-party support to the initiative. Discussed since 2014, still in the PT government, the Brazilian proposal will count on teaching children to high school. It will cover public and private colleges, in a universe of 40 million students (in the US, it is 55 million). In defining what the Brazilian student should know in each series, the document will be a mandatory reference for new teaching materials and for teacher training. States and municipalities will elaborate their own plans (the curricula themselves) to teach what the National Base determines. This broad reorganization was also what the United States had been expecting with the Common Core since 2010. Today, however, optimism has turned into skepticism. Of the 45 States that adopted the Common Core, 9 gave up. The popular approval measure, which reached 90% in 2012, is now 50%. Among teachers, support dropped from 80% to about 40% in the same period.

 What happened between 2010 and 2017?

The most heard responses in the last seven months of the report, which visited schools and consulted academic studies, researchers, officials, directors, and teachers in different American states, such as New York, Kentucky, Washington, .

"The best curriculum in the world, but this is not enough," he told German newspaper Andreas Schleicher, principal of Pisa students.

In coordinating this test since its inception 20 years ago, Schleicher is one of the most knowledgeable of educational systems in the world. "Without a good implementation, a good curriculum can turn into words on paper." Implementation is the stage that Brazil is about to face.

The US did not improve at the last test of Pisa, applied in 2015. Some states used the Common Core two or three years ago, but American students remained below the average for developed countries in mathematics.

Long Islander, New York's middle class, Jeanette Deutermann, 43, remembers the early stages of the Common Core. By 2012, your child began to experience stomach pains. I cried to go to school, which is public. A doctor said it could be stress. "What do you mean, stress on an eight-year-old boy?" Her mother recalls.

Still clueless about what was happening, the housewife talked to educators. He found that the curriculum had changed because of the common core. The way of teaching was different. The boy did not understand the lessons, and the mother could not help him anymore, because she did not know the new method.

Evaluating teachers and schools had a specific purpose: to try to ensure that the new curriculum was actually adopted in classrooms.

Worry made sense. In 1979, Larry Cuban, now a professor emeritus at the Stanford University School of Education, was already comparing curriculum reforms to the passage of a drilling in the ocean: there is tremendous agitation on the surface, but the deep waters remain almost unchanged.