By ANDREA HARADA*
What will become of the teacher in the new regulatory framework for distance learning: a hidden, undefined or non-existent subject?
Holding brake
The Ministry of Education, through the Secretariat for Regulation and Supervision of Higher Education (SERES-MEC), announced a long time ago a broad review of the regulatory framework for Distance Learning and the quality references for undergraduate courses in this modality. Everything indicates – at least until further notice – that the review of the regulatory framework should be completed by December 31, 2024. This is what is established by Ordinance 528 published on June 07, 06.
The previous day, on 06/06/2024, the MEC, through Ordinance 529, (re)established the Advisory Council for the Improvement of Regulation and Supervision Processes in Higher Education (CC-Pares). And shortly thereafter, on July 11, 2024, with Ordinance 335, it appointed the members of said Council, which was made up of 8 representatives from the MEC, 1 from Andifes, 1 from CONIF, 1 from UNE and 8 representatives from the private higher education sector.
On January 22, 2024,[I] Articles circulated in the mainstream press reported that the MEC was alarmed by the ratio of students to professors in private higher education, highlighting the drop in the number of professors in the sector. According to these articles, 11 institutions – all private – were being monitored due to the disproportionality of professors in relation to the number of students. One of the higher education institutions, the Leonardo da Vinci University Center, had 2594 students for every professor. This fact would have set off alarm bells for the diploma factory that had accepted the growth of distance learning.
On July 24, 2024,[ii] the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, in an article that reflected the recent Ordinances issued by the MEC, highlighted the existence of 47.734 active distance learning centers in Brazil.
This is the scenario framed in the decisions of the Ministry of Education in 2024, which so far indicate that the containment brake was applied to block the floodgate opened by previous regulations that represent, on the one hand, a regulation that is biasedly beneficial to the growth of capital in education and, on the other, highlight the emergency of reviewing the parameters for exploring distance learning in the private sector.
Precariousness of teaching work in private higher education is an old problem
In article[iii] written with Gabriel Teixeira and Plínio Gentil, in 2022, we warned about a category in extinction: private college professors. Confronting the conditions of teaching work with the oligopolized higher education market and the advancement of the use of communication and information technologies, especially in the distance learning modality in its various forms in undergraduate courses: distance learning, hybrid and in-person.
We stated there, and reiterate here, that the growth of the private sector occurred in a subsidized manner through programs such as PROUNI, FIES and PROIES, which initially encouraged greater inclusion and also financed the growth of higher education companies. This process was not accompanied by regulation compatible with the announced purpose of democratizing access.
Private HEIs, in addition to being commercialized, have embraced financialization and started operating within the framework of resource optimization with a view to increasing their capacity to increase value or, in other words, to increase their profits. The shortest and quickest path in business vocabulary: optimize resources and reduce costs, especially with payroll.
Processes to reduce teaching hours began with classrooms or grouping classes together and led to the indiscriminate use of technology. As is well known, most teachers in the private sector work hours per class hour. Today, it is rare to find teachers working 20 hours per class, which would fill a full working week.
There are many problems related to working conditions and salaries: the absence of a minimum wage in many regions of the country, job instability, loss of autonomy, creation of teaching subcategories (tutors and content creators), lack of regulation on copyright, among others. All of this is a generic and progressive characteristic of teaching work in private higher education. Or of what remains of teaching work in this sector.
But the advancement of distance learning, within the framework of our type of development, raises the problem to another dimension and to another question: is it possible to have higher education without a teacher? What kind of education would that be? Or would it not even be that, but rather the sale of a diploma in installments?
In 2024, the MEC, as we have seen, announced that the drop in the number of teachers in higher education was a cause for concern. It is no wonder: according to data from the Higher Education Census (INEP, 2024), in 2013 the private sector – already consolidated, it is necessary to note – accounted for 5.373.450 enrollments for 212.063 teachers; in 2023, enrollments jumped to 7.907.652 for 186.633 teachers, that is, while enrollments registered a growth of 47,16% in a 10-year interval, the number of teachers registered a drop of 11,99%.
And in the case of the private sector, the simple formula of dividing enrollments by teachers and arriving at a ratio is useless, because the hours worked by these teachers are not computed and are hidden by several factors that the INEP survey does not capture, making INEP's main census study, the Higher Education Census, flawed due to its imprecision when it deals with the private sector. In any case, even if imprecise, the data is enough to cause alarm.
Data collected for our doctoral research, defended at the end of 2023, showed that according to information provided by HEIs and recorded by INEP, in distance learning courses this disproportion is immense, as we can see in the table below, which used data from 2021 (HARADA SOUSA, p. 172)[iv].
Given that a teacher-student ratio of 2287 is the same as stating that education is without a teacher. It is absolutely impossible to assume an effective teaching and learning relationship or an academic relationship with a view to professional training in light of this number. How do we arrive at this ratio?
First, it is necessary to highlight the fostering role of different governments in the private education sector, which encouraged the emergence of an attractive market and consolidated capital in education since education ceased to be a right and became a service.[v].
Second, the businessmen and education merchants who demanded and celebrated the possibility of exploring distance learning and converting everything they could into educational products and business opportunities. The chaos generated by the combination of state incentives for the private sector and the exploitative and expropriatory zeal of this sector creates an environment in which there have never been so many people with degrees, and at the same time so many people without education.
But to get there, the way was to replace – if not convert – teachers into teaching subcategories without any regulation, that is, since there were no teachers capable of training an exorbitant number of students, the method used by private HEIs, especially large conglomerates, was to assign responsibility to professionals who until now (shortly before the publication of the decree) were identified as tutors and content providers.
This formula was also applied to the 40% of distance learning authorized in face-to-face courses, with other varied nuances, but with the same purpose. This process resulted in the explicit reduction in the number of teachers employed in HEIs, as well as the intense reduction in the working hours of those who remained employed as teachers. This brings us to the problem of the creation of the CC-Pares and the pressures on the eve of the publication of the Decree.
(i) CC-Peers and the erasure of the teacher in the debate on the new regulatory framework for distance learning
As we saw at the beginning of this text, the MEC associated this year's legal measures with the scandalous teacher-to-student ratio in distance learning in the private sector. It was no surprise that it identified that teacher training – which has been taking place mostly in private HEIs and in the distance learning modality – needed to be reviewed. It suspended new centers and new course accreditations. It recreated the CC-Pares and here we are waiting for this review and regulation process to propel us forward. But it hasn't.
The CC-Pares was formed predominantly by representatives of the MEC and the private sector. And perhaps the expression “Pares” in the acronym of the aforementioned advisory board is more than a coincidence. A representative of the UNE (National Union of Students) was also appointed to serve on the board. With the exception of ANDIFES (National Association of Directors of Federal Higher Education Institutions), CONIF (National Council of Institutions of the Federal Network of Professional, Scientific and Technological Education) and CNE (National Council of Education) – which is formed by several representatives of the private sector, all other representatives of the public sector are from the MEC. The private sector participates, represented by ANEC (National Association of Catholic Education of Brazil), ABIEE (Brazilian Association of Evangelical Educational Institutions), ABRUC (Brazilian Association of Community Institutions of Higher Education), ABMES (Brazilian Association of Higher Education Providers), ABRAFI (Brazilian Association of College Providers), SEMESP (Union of Institutions that Provide Higher Education Establishments in the State of São Paulo), ANACEU (National Association of University Centers) and ANUP (National Association of Private Universities).
No entity representing teachers – from the public or private sector – was part of the council. Not one! There are eight entities representing and supporting the private sector. This is not a fact that could go unnoticed given the initial problem that directly involves the reduction in the number of teachers in higher education and the countless consequences of this long process that resulted from the predominant service to the interests of the private sector. In constituting the CC-Pares, the MEC operated as if the new regulation involved only two actors: the State and the market, not necessarily in that order.
On December 03rd, ABMES held a seminar[vi] with the members of the private sector who were part of the council. The director of INEP – Ulisses Tavares – also participated in this event – almost unanimously among the representatives of the sector.
However, in addition to the complimentary tone towards the INEP representative who will participate in the formulation of new instruments for assessing HEIs in accordance with the new decree, the members highlighted their concerns about the imminent decree, including the redefinition of the teaching staff, which foresees, in addition to the responsible teacher, the role of the mediating teacher or pedagogical mediator replacing the tutor, which, as previously stated, has no regulation. They also oppose the limitation of students per teacher or mediating teacher to 50.
For the representative of Semesp and member of CC-Pares, Rodrigo Capellato[vii]: “A concept that concerns us a lot is the concept of categorized teacher and mediator teacher (…). Today we have a tutor who plays the role of administrative tutor and academic tutor, let’s say. This academic tutor is the same role that public universities, including federal universities, have master’s and doctoral students who monitor the teacher. He is not a teacher. If I put this mediation as a teacher, he will fall directly into the teachers’ collective bargaining agreement. This will also destroy the system, because it was something we put in place, it doesn’t work…he is not and (sic). He doesn’t teach, so how am I going to pay him for his teaching hours? (…) Am I going to give him a six-month salary guarantee? (…)”
As can be seen from this statement, the problem for the representative of the employers' union and interlocutor in the CC-Pares seems to be about rights and payroll and not about definitions and attributions. Much less about quality education. He directly expresses that he wants to keep a type of worker without rights and even asks in an exclamatory tone: “Am I going to give him a six-month salary guarantee?”
Despite the almost colloquial tone of the speech, because among peers, this is the effective position of the private sector and the real interest of capital in education: to reduce or eliminate the participation of teachers in higher education academic training, to sell cheaper certificates, more operational training and guarantee the reproduction of a precarious workforce for the precarious labor market.
It is likely that business sectors will organize themselves and defend their interests, just as it is true that capital has always been interested in replacing living labor with dead labor or, if living labor is essential, that it be overexploited and without rights, as some employer representatives want. What is unreasonable is that the MEC, under the pretext of correcting some of the serious problems in private higher education, deliberately ignores the fact that all actors involved in distance learning and higher education should be heard and not forgotten. This is especially unacceptable if these actors are workers who provide education – distance learning, in-person or blended.
It has been commonly believed that the broad front government is trapped by the unfavorable correlation of forces, but in this case, as in others in recent politics, it was the government itself that defined its interlocutors. Given this, it is unlikely to assume that such a constitution does not express the government's continuity project for education.
The trigger for the review of the regulatory framework that, together with other legal documents, have shaped educational policy since the end of the 1990s that brought us here, was the exposure of a largely degraded education system, which required interference from the public authorities in order to reconfigure, at least in part, the aberration of more than 2000 students for one teacher.
However, the prospects that emerge in this scenario, in which the predominant and unsurprising “pair” is composed of the State and the market, do not allow us to glimpse much more than a new decree to legitimize business interests in education.
Despite all this, the decree has not yet been published. It does not change the fact that by creating an advisory board without any teacher representation, the MEC repeated the practice of promoting legal changes that treat teachers as hidden, undefined or, even worse, non-existent subjects. There are many forms of silencing and erasure; preventing teachers from debating and formulating opinions on matters related to their profession is one of them.
If the decree planned for what remains of 2024 maintains the uncertainty regarding the different forms of teaching work in distance learning, the employment of subcategories that are even more precarious than teachers in the private education sector will be perpetuated and the MEC will once again have favored the expansion and hegemony of the private sector in the education of our youth, especially the poor, who will be able to access higher education but to feed the continuous movement of exclusion disguised as inclusion.
*Andrea Harada She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Education at Unicamp and is president of the Guarulhos Teachers' Union..
Notes
[I] Available in https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2024/01/mec-vai-apurar-alta-proporcao-de-alunos-por-professor-em-11-faculdades-particulares.shtml
[ii] Available in https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2024/07/terceirizacao-atinge-46-dos-polos-ead-no-brasil.shtml
[iii] Available in https://diplomatique.org.br/professores-de-faculdades-privadas-categoria-em-extincao/#:~:text=Efeito%20da%20financeiriza%C3%A7%C3%A3o%2C%20do%20EaD,s%C3%A3o%20hoje%20categoria%20em%20extin%C3%A7%C3%A3o.
[iv] HARADA SOUSA, Andrea Luciana. Education in Liquidation: Commodification, Distance Education and Changes in Teaching Work in Private Higher Education. Sousa. Thesis defended at the Faculty of Education of UNICAMP.
[v] Decree 2.306 of August 19, 1997, which in its first article authorized the maintainers to change their statutes, allowing them to change their nature from the civil to the commercial field, as a consequence it authorized the displacement of education from the field of law to the field of marketable services, therefore subject to exploitation with a view to capital accumulation.
[vi] Available in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI7kguRSa5o
[vii] Available in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI7kguRSa5o from 2:46:55
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