Educational Policies in the Northeast of Brazil in times of Pandemic:

opportunity for Edu-business?

Abstract

The study seeks to understand how similar policies have disseminated to different parts of the world during the pandemic, following the logic of the Global Movement for Educational Reform (GERM), a process that expands in Brazil with strong neoliberal and business accents, articulated with neoconservative interests. To do so, we comparatively analyzed the educational policies adopted in the nine states of the Northeast region of Brazil in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking to understand the processes of mobility/policy transfer, as well as the influence of the private sector on the educational and political decisions of public education system. Using some elements of network ethnography, the actions of the Northeast State Departments of Education and their main “partners” were mapped. The role of the private sector in conducting the policies adopted by the states was analysed, offering training actions for managers and teachers, the intensification of control and monitoring of teaching work, as well as the concern with curricular reorganization through the alignment of contents to assessments and the National Learning Standards. Edu-business has seen the pandemic as an opportunity to expand its influence on public education, so that the “new normal” tends to reaffirm the old parameters of the market, at the same time that there is an accelerated growth of inequalities.