By CAROLINA CATINI & GUSTAVO MOURA DE CAVALCANTI MELLO*
The auction of public schools by Tarcísio de Freitas reflects an education model at the service of economic power, a falsified education, which becomes an obstacle to the training process
1.
The grotesque scene of a far-right governor striking a hammer during the auction ritual of state schools on the stock exchange is also a celebration of those who are taking a few more steps forward in the project of putting the people's education at the service of power. Paying tribute to the patriarchal imaginary, the gesture seeks to express aggressiveness, virility, strength, and implicitly praises destruction – the destruction of everything that escapes the clutches of the market, which does not serve exclusively to guarantee the accumulation of economic and political power.
While it is true that it is a common policy on the right and left of both parties to promote the acquisition of social services by private companies, which take them under their control and privatize them, inserting them into the financial markets, it is necessary to recognize that this dynamic of “creative destruction” – and destructive creation – is becoming more radical and taking on new forms under far-right governments, as is the case with the Tarcísio de Freitas government. Those who claim that the so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs) that are being signed are more of the same, that they are just another wave of outsourcing, without any impact on the forms of social rights and social reproduction, are mistaken.
Thus, even though our focus here is education, its analysis would be flawed if we did not take it into account in the context of a broad process of transformation of social policies and the provision of basic services: the auction of schools takes place after the “privatization” of Sabesp and in the midst of the “auction marathon” which, according to the São Paulo Secretary of Partnerships and Investments, is nothing less than the creation of a new “business environment”, which aims to “consolidate São Paulo as a national reference in attracting investments”.
The portfolio estimated at more than R$495 billion reais is a “major financial boost” from the state to the social sector, with the promise to attract R$20 billion in private sector investment from a portfolio of projects with “modern models” and “high degree of return for investors”, according to official statements.
Among the projects developed with this “attractive modeling”, the investment partnerships department offers consortiums between companies and investment funds large infrastructure projects, including water and energy services, mobility (trains and subways), and highway concessions, in addition to social projects, such as the PPP for new schools that is on the agenda, but also projects for school maintenance, social housing, lotteries, urban parks, technology parks, and so on.[1] Even with the Casa Foundation, the aim is to attract private investment.
Such measures were catapulted, among others, by the “São Paulo Plan in the Right Direction”, established by decree in May 2024, which includes proposals to promote the “sale of real estate assets”, to improve and expand tax incentives for companies, and the construction of a “receivables securitization plan”. The latter would serve to leverage the issuance of public debt securities based on tax and non-tax state credits, issued by Companhia Paulista de Securitização (CPSEC), a corporation formally controlled by the government of the State of São Paulo.
But privatization is not imposed as the “right direction” only in the state of São Paulo. Investment Partnerships Program (PPI) of the Presidency of the Republic It also “enters into partnership contracts and other privatization measures.” In fact, on July 2 of this year, Federal Complementary Law No. 208 was enacted, standardizing the securitization of public assets throughout the country, at the three levels of government.
In short, we are talking about portfolios of social impact projects offered to large business groups to invest in and make a profit through temporary possession of state assets and control over the provision of essential services to the population. These new markets and business models are attractive to companies and investors, who, in addition to being remunerated by the state, will obtain returns in the financial markets. In this way, a caste composed of businesspeople, fund managers and investors is invited to “invest in Brazil”, participating managerially and politically in the management of what we know as social rights.
On the federal government website, we learn, for example, that “the PPI functions as a HUB”, that is, as a space that allows the acceleration of social impact projects as it brings together and establishes connections between the different interested parties, known in the financial market as “stakeholders”. According to the Sebrae, "you hubs innovation integrate and stimulate interaction between different actors in an innovation ecosystem such as startups, companies, educational and research institutions, as well as investors. All in an environment that favors networking and connections to generate innovative businesses”.
Just like a State HUB, a private sector HUB like Itaú Cube introduces itself as a non-profit organization that promotes “transformation in people’s lives through incredible solutions that, directly or indirectly, impact the entire society”. In short, we are faced with the same discourse and the same organizational form that tries to impose itself in the different spheres of social life, indistinctly.
Thinking about it this way, it would be worth asking ourselves whether this is really about privatization or whether it is, above all, a keyword ideological and propagandistic to attract ultra-liberals and other ideologues of the stateless world. And if instead of privatization we are not observing the entrepreneurship of the State, converted into a Hub and a “stakeholder privileged”, since it is an almost total financing, management and social institution, which integrates all free or subsidized social services?
After all, many of these services and social structures, with their billion-dollar state budgets, are seen as veritable gold mines, with very low risk, to be exploited by large business corporations. In terms of discourse, this state entrepreneurship appears as a strategy to attract private investment, which aims to relieve the state, reduce costs, ensure greater spending efficiency, guarantee fiscal austerity, etc., but in practice it is clear that this path involves a historical plundering of state coffers by business gangs, with the transfer of increasingly large amounts of resources directly to the accounts of these corporations.
At the same time that they subordinate state budgets to private profit, they insert basic social services into the financial flows of capital markets, fixing them in the position of assets or assets that must guarantee profitability and attract investment. It does not matter whether it is a highway or a school: the order is to maximize payments made by the state, minimize costs, making the services provided as precarious as possible and debasing employee salaries, and converting state “assets” into collateral and bait to leverage companies and increase the value of their shares.
But finally, if it is necessary to observe that the transformation of the school into a field of capital accumulation and even into a financial asset occurs within a process of transformation of social rights into impact businesses that, in turn, indicate a reconfiguration of the State itself, it is now necessary to place the lens on what is specific to this process in the area of education.
2.
When school becomes a financial asset, what education is put into practice?
Na page of the state secretariat for partnerships and investments you can find both the auction for “new schools” and the auction for “maintenance and adaptation of schools”, both under the investment heading Social. And in both cases the schools are designated as active: greenfield, in the first case, and brownfield, in the second, according to the language of financial markets, which distinguish investments aimed at creating new assets from those made in existing assets.
The auction for the new schools was divided into two lots: the first foresees the construction of 17 new state schools, and the second of 16, both within a period of 18 months. In addition, the bidding companies gain the right to offer maintenance, cleaning, surveillance and food services in the schools for a period of 23 and a half years (totaling 25 years).
The first auction, held on October 29, 10, was won by the Novas Escolas Oeste São Paulo consortium, led by Engeform Engenharia Ltda., in partnership with Kinea, and advised by KLA Law, which provided advice through its specialists in public law and capital markets. Engeform advertises itself as an “engineering”, “real estate development”, “energy”, “concessions and investment” and “resource management” company.
Kinea, in turn, announces on its website that it was founded by former executives of Bank Boston in 2007, in partnership with Itaú, and that in 2008 it launched a real estate fund. In 2009 it began to carry out activities of private equity (investments in companies aiming to open their capital on stock exchanges); in 2010 it created its first fund listed on the stock exchange; in 2011, in a private equity, acquired the company Unidas, one of the largest car rental companies in the country, and Grupo Multi, a holding company of schools in which Wizard and Yázigi stand out.[2]
Since then, the company has launched real estate receivables, multimarket, pension, fixed income, infrastructure, private credit, equity and agricultural credit funds, and has become a major asset manager, with more than R$130 billion under management.
In total, the state government initially expects to transfer R$3,38 billion to the consortium over the term of the contract. Engeform CEO Marcelo Castro seems to be right when he stated in his speech that “the opportunity for this partnership to build schools is the World Cup for our sector. That is why we are very happy with the result.”
The statement was made shortly after the announcement of the results of the bidding process, or rather, the stock exchange auction. Incidentally, it is difficult not to associate this image of the World Cup with the mega sporting events hosted in the country in the past decade, with their white elephants, the overpricing of the works, the reports of degrading working conditions for the workers, the rampant corruption, the forced evictions, the administrative collapse of the city of Rio de Janeiro, and so on…
Many people have already drawn attention to the ironic (and ominous) fact that Engeform is known for having won the bid to manage seven cemeteries in the city of São Paulo. This notion that the type of object managed is indifferent to the managers on duty is old, and has a long tradition in the outsourcing of food, security, maintenance, etc. services in schools and daycare centers. The business is the management itself, as if there were a single, universal form, based on technocratic precepts, which can be indiscriminately applied to any area and any institution, regardless of their intrinsic qualities and purposes. If this indifference becomes more radical with the perception that it doesn't matter whether it's about education, life, death, or training, it also deepens the reification of educational relations with financialization.
The second lot, auctioned on 04/11/2024, was won by the SP + Escolas consortium, made up of 5 private organizations, which should receive the expected amount of R$3,25 billion from the state government. The leading company, Agrimat Engenharia e Empreendimentos Ltda, is a highway construction company, but the consortium's main player is Astra Educacional, whose CEO is José Alípio, the former owner of Escola Mais, a network of low-cost schools installed in several neighborhoods in the city of SP. The aforementioned businessman bragged of the privilege of having expertise in the area to win the competition, but it was not specified that it is a vast experience in innovating in the art of making education precarious, and managing schools as if they were sausage factories.
Anticipating the platformization of education and the digitalization of content, the company Escola Mais, even before the pandemic, already hired a handful of specialists to produce written and audiovisual material, and many education professionals to act as replicators of the materials, devoid of any pedagogical autonomy, possibility of creating and managing knowledge according to the context and existing relationships.
With few male and female teachers earning the minimum wage, and many people hired as underpaid monitors and interns, labor costs are clearly reduced. But the entire package is presented as a pedagogical modernization, which, in a magic and marketing move, sells the passive consumption of content by students as “active methodologies” of “flipped classes”. This is how the Escola Mais method, long before reaching auctions on the stock exchange, conquered markets and was purchased by state education networks in the “window of opportunities” that the misfortune of the period of social distancing opened up for businesspeople.
The intensification and increase of working hours, as well as the reduction of salaries, the deskilling and the control over teaching work are not new in the reality of national education, much less in the states where this privatization model is underway. It is no coincidence that some of the states that are at the forefront of the current privatization wave have the dishonor of having appointed Renato Feder as secretary of education.
Paraná, for example, stands out for the fact that management contracts between the State and consortiums allow the use of a workforce selected by the State, but also partly for the hiring of teachers by the company, with which, obviously, the companies maximize profits through reduced salaries and precarious contracts. Despite also using the discourse of the split between the pedagogical dimension and business management, the direct hiring of professionals and the establishment of goals through agreements imposed from the top down completely eliminate the possibility of avoiding company interference in education.
Still in the case of Paraná, part of the state remuneration of the management company is conditional on meeting targets, for example, linked to the number of students approved per year, which denies any degree of teaching autonomy.[3] It didn't take long for reports to emerge of teachers who were coerced by management to manipulate data and defraud the production of indexes used in assessments.
There have also been reports of unjustified dismissals of employees on the eve of their first year of contract, in order to reduce labor costs, as well as the replacement of tenured teachers with temporary contract teachers, which would also increase the remuneration of the management companies, and so on. In fact, the aforementioned report highlights that the transfer of state resources appears to be a veritable black box, which makes it difficult to establish the actual costs of these management structures.
But the fact is that state schools have long been managed as if they were companies, with purposes defined by the business community that formulates educational policies and designs educational reforms, with the outsourcing of functions that increase the alienation and precariousness of educational work, with the maximum number of precarious contracts for teachers, with the imposition of goals established in a way that is completely unrelated to those who work or study, with its management by results, its 360 evaluation methods or results improvement method and, more recently, with platformization.
It is no coincidence, once again, that the states of São Paulo and Paraná share the same “education uber”, which has the curious name of Business Intelligence – the BI, whose foreignness is manifested by the pronunciation in English (“bi ai”) mentioned in the destroyed corridors of gated and dilapidated public schools. Some schools display panels at the entrance that report the engagement of teachers and students in each platform in real time (platforms for mathematics, Portuguese, writing, for each subject). In short, a platformization with which management with absolute control of teaching work, engagement time and student performance is carried out, as well as the fulfillment of goals as objective and measurable as in the production of goods.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers are mobilized every day to carry out a completely heteronomous activity, expropriated from any possibility of decision-making about their work and education. With corporate control, working youth tend to be subjected, full-time, to an education devoid of critical thinking, knowledge and culture, but filled with platformized, gamified activities, work simulation and entrepreneurship. The poorest youth, who need to work, are offered financial aid to prevent them from dropping out of school, to keep them busy and, in some cases, to make them work during the school year, in generally precarious conditions, to consecrate the corporate model of “work-based learning”.
Cynically, these more vulnerable youth are also offered possibilities of “financial inclusion” through the purchase of national treasury bonds (educa +), with which it would be possible to make more money with the scarce resources received through government grants.[4]
It is this demoralized and dilapidated education, with professionals and students who are objectified, monitored and weakened, that is subject to being converted into a financial asset. Under the state strategy of making things precarious in order to privatize, the financial markets appear as true saviors of the nation, instead of being seen as an important part of the problem and as vectors of worsening an education whose purpose is profit, not training. This is an indefensible education.
An education that serves economic power is a falsified education that becomes an obstacle to the educational process. From an immediate political point of view, it can only strengthen the anti-intellectual, individualistic and “entrepreneurial” extreme right. From the point of view of autonomy, on the contrary, it calls for confrontation and the creation of alternatives. Because it is clear that the financialization of education and social rights deepens social divisions: it strengthens those who have the capital to surf the waves of plunder and speculation, on the one hand; it buys the subordination and silencing of those who position themselves as puppets of the elites, on the other; and it intensifies the exploitation, oppression and discarding of the bulk of the population, which in this context tends to internalize the logic of competition to the detriment of solidarity and collectivism.
In 2016, after a harsh crackdown on the protest against the reform of secondary education in Mexico, several musical groups from different traditions and styles came together to pay tribute to activists murdered by the State and to strengthen the fight for education. They were already positioning themselves against the “reform that calls itself educational” because they knew that the so-called reform was taking place within the framework of a set of transformations demanded by capital in order to reproduce its domination, which demands the annihilation of autonomies, rebellious cultures and all thought and practice that escapes domination and denies its precepts.
Faced with this process, these artists and activists positioned themselves “on fighting feet”, as in the title of the song, to denounce the plan that we see unfolding before our eyes. At a certain point in the song we can hear (in a free translation) that:
“They intend to insert education directly as securities, on the stock exchange \ Delegating the State's responsibility to the market, which is its superior \ It is the same thing that has been happening for a long time, affecting all sectors \ And to achieve their objectives they have to annihilate their opponents
Privatizing education is what is missing \ Meeting market goals is what matters \ It doesn't matter if thousands are killing hope \ Money is what gives them confidence” (Mexican Sound System in "On Lutcha's Foot” (V&D by Gran OM: Video Clip).
Through its form, its content and the context it expresses, this song shows us that there is life outside the logic of conciliation and concessions to leaders; a logic that has been crushing us for so long and making us unlearn nonconformity and the ability to envision other paths.
Amidst the rubble, the left debates for the umpteenth time the mistakes of its electoral strategy or whether or not it has anything to say, while the business community advances rapidly over state education, expands its political and economic power, and increasingly dominates an important part of the process of educating the working population, imposing its practices and ideologies on it, and thus increasing our subjugation.
It is necessary to give this ongoing process its due importance... Who knows, maybe we can hear the refrain of compass Mexicans, faced with the same crossroads we now find ourselves in: “Education at the service of power or education for the people who will defend it. We were born with nothing, we have nothing to lose. No to privatization, no to the abuse of the law.”
* Carolina Catini is a professor at the Faculty of Education at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).
Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello is a professor at the Department of Economics at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).
Originally published on Boitempo's blog.
Notes
[1] The full list can be found here here
[2] The Multi Group was created by Carlos Wizard, formerly Carlos Roberto Martins, who in recent years has made headlines both for his strong support for Jair Bolsonaro and for having been investigated by the Covid CPI, accused of being part of the “parallel cabinet” to the Ministry of Health, responsible for spreading denialism and the so-called “early treatment”.
[3] Reference for all information related to Paraná: ANIBAL, Felipe. The Experiment: Paraná opens the doors of public schools to private companies. Magazine Piauí, Education Issues. Issue 216, September 2024.
[4] In this regard, see the article “High school reform will not be Instagrammable: financial incentives, student work and financialization”.
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