For some time now, I have been looking into the issue of teacher training for elementary and secondary education in Brazil. To the uninformed, all elementary and secondary school teachers must have (or should have) a college degree to enter the classroom. There are three possible paths for courses and careers in this field.

• The first track is the undergraduate degree program in Education, for those who intend to become teachers in early childhood education and grades 1 through 4 of elementary school (formerly kindergarten through 4th grade for more mature students).
• The second track consists of bachelor’s degree programs in Language Arts, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arts, etc., for those who intend to become teachers of these subjects in grades 5 through 9 of elementary school (formerly grades 5 through 8) and also in grades 1 through 3 of high school (formerly secondary school or high school).
• The third and final path, or option, is for professionals with degrees in fields other than education to complete an undergraduate program called “Teacher Training for Graduates,” which lasts, on average, one to two years. With these courses, an engineer, for example, can complete the pedagogical training and teach physics, chemistry, or mathematics from 5th grade through 12th grade. The idea behind this third path is to allow professionals who have already earned degrees in fields other than education to teach in their areas of expertise, learning only the pedagogical aspects they did not cover in their original degree programs.

Teacher training: The Enade results show that future teachers know very little about what they will be teaching their future students. Credit: Pexels.

Now, let’s talk about the exam that the MEC (Ministry of Education) requires all eligible students nearing the end of their higher education programs to take: the well-known Enade (National Student Performance Exam). The exam is administered every three years for a specific group of programs defined by the MEC.

Ideally, the Enade should be administered annually across all degree programs, but due to logistical and cost considerations, it is actually administered every three years. As a result, students in education programs take the exam every three years. The most recent results are from exams administered in 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2017.

The education group was scheduled to take the Enade in 2020, but the pandemic disrupted those plans. The proposal from Inep (Anísio Teixeira National Institute for Educational Studies and Research), the agency responsible for developing and administering the Enade, is for the assessment to take place in November of this year.

Analyzing the results of the last four evaluation cycles, we found that a total of 13,429 Bachelor’s degree programs and 4,215 early childhood education programs—with 449,947 and 352,407 students, respectively—administered the exams. An analysis of the data reveals shocking results from the perspective of training the professionals who will educate our children and adolescents for the next 30 to 40 years.

The MEC scores have been adjusted in a simplified manner to make them easier to understand. Explanations of these adjustments follow immediately after the results section for those who are interested.

Grades for Our Future Teachers

Grades of students in the Bachelor's degree programs

We can see that of the more than 100,000 graduating students who took the exams, more than half—or as many as 61% in 2017—received poor or very poor scores. (It is worth noting that the ENADE exam does not result in students failing; rather, it is used by the Ministry of Education (MEC) as a tool to evaluate degree programs; students face no penalties for poor performance.) Even with poor scores, students graduate as usual and are eligible to teach.

 

Grades of students in the education programs

In early childhood education programs, the results are somewhat worse. Since the 2011 exam, more than 70% of students—that is, future teachers—have received poor or very poor scores on their exams. What makes this situation even more concerning is that we’re talking about early childhood educators, whose role is precisely to lay the most important foundation for a person’s development of knowledge. If this foundation is deficient, the entire structure built upon it will repeat the problem.

It is also important to understand that Enade assesses students' knowledge of the subjects they will be teaching.In other words: the results show that future teachers know very little about what they will be teaching their future students.

If they were professionals in the private sector, this issue of low productivity would result in unemployment. But since the vast majority work or will work in public schools and are entitled to job security, this problem persists in the form of very poor-quality education for our young people—a consequence that is evident in all the international rankings in which Brazil participates.

Another important point is the issue of teaching techniques, which national curricula often neglect because they are too focused on theoretical and philosophical discussions of education. Even the few who know what they are going to teach do not learn the best techniques for doing so.

We should be more concerned with teaching students to read, interpret, and produce texts, in addition to performing the four basic mathematical operations—shortcomings that, incidentally, are not uncommon among students entering higher education in Brazil. In engineering programs, for example, freshmen have difficulty performing rule-of-threes or percentage calculations.

Here are some important questions to help us reflect on this catastrophe.

• What would be the appropriate solutions for training new teachers who are proficient in the subject they will teach and in the (technical) methods they will use to help students study and learn more effectively?
• What should we do with the more than two million teachers who are currently qualified and working in the sector to bridge these glaring gaps?

A country facing this situation—where less than 100% of the population has access to safe drinking water and half lacks access to basic sanitation, which are other factors that hinder our children’s cognitive development—should not afford to focus on any other issue before improving the quality of its teacher training.

Additional Notes

Regarding the methodology used to calculate the scores presented in this article. To make the explanation clear and the results easy to understand, even for those outside the field of education, the following adjustments were made to the test results:

• Scores are released by the MEC by program on a scale from 1 to 5 with several decimal places, where 1 represents the lowest score and 5 the highest. These scores are calculated using formulas established by the MEC for the exams, in which students receive a score from 0 to 100 based on an assessment of the specific knowledge they are expected to have for the program (75% weight) and general knowledge (25% weight). This final score from 0 to 100 is converted to a continuous Enade score from 0 to 5, proportionally reflecting the decimal places.
• The MEC publishes these scores by converting the continuous ENADE score into a scaled ENADE score using a scale from 1 to 5 without decimals, but with rounding based on the concept of a discrete variable, which results in all students who scored between 0.945 and 1.945 receiving a score of 2, whereas normally the first score (0.945) would be 1 due to simple mathematical rounding.
• In the table of results presented, to simplify matters and make them easier to understand, the students’ actual scores on the continuous ENADE scale were used, rather than the ENADE Concept score assigned by the MEC based on a discrete variable. For educational purposes, these scores were categorized as Excellent (4.6 to 5.0), Good (3.6 to 4.5), Fair (2.6 to 3.5), Poor (1.6 to 2.5), and Very Poor (0.1 to 1.5).

 

About the author:

José Maria de Vasconcellos e Sá is CEO of the organization that operates Veiga de Almeida University in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, and the Jorge Amado University Center in Salvador, BA; Chairman of the Board of Great Schools S/A; and a partner at Multiversa Consultoria. Email:jsa@multiversa.com.br.

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