Sent to Congress on June 25, the new National Education Plan (PNE) still has a long way to go for discussion in the plenary sessions of the Legislative Houses.
To begin with, it is still necessary to define the procedure. The last PNE, approved in 2014, was analyzed by a special commission made up of parliamentarians with knowledge and affinity with the topic.
A CNN found that, now, the Education Committee of the Chamber of Deputies is concerned about losing its leading role during the discussion if the analysis of the project is repeated as it was a decade ago.
The president of the collegiate, Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG), has been defending behind the scenes that the matter be discussed in the Education Commission.
Due to the delay in the project reaching the Legislature at the beginning of the discussion, it was necessary for parliamentarians to vote to extend the current guidelines, defined in 2014, until the end of 2025.
With municipal elections approaching and the emptying of Parliament, coupled with the intensification of coordination for succession in the Chamber, parliamentarians consider that the debate on the PNE be postponed to 2025 — which would further increase the delay in approving the new Plan.
Understand the PNE
The PNE establishes the education sector’s goals for the next decade. The plan sent by the government contains 18 objectives, with 58 established goals and 253 strategies. Furthermore, the plan focuses on the quality of learning, the issue of equity and inclusion to reduce educational inequality in our country.
The previous plan expired on June 25, and despite the articulation of the Mixed Parliamentary Front for Education to create a special commission to speed up the processing of the new Plan, the way in which it will be processed has not yet been defined.
In contrast to the delay in sending the project by the government to Congress, the new text was well received by deputies. “The MEC text is very technical and was well received, I did not feel any resistance as I had noticed in the Conae text (National Education Conference, held in February), due to its ideological content. I didn’t see anything that was controversial, or that someone was drawing too much attention to a point”, said federal deputy Rafael Brito (MDB-AL) to CNN.
Senate
In view of the inertia in the Chamber, the Senate has already started discussions based on the Executive text. Senator Flávio Arns (PSB-PR), president of the House Education Committee, decided to bring forward the debate by holding 20 public hearings. Next Monday (23) the fifth meeting will take place.
Arns, who was rapporteur for the New Basic Education Maintenance and Development Fund (Fundeb), approved in 2020 in the Senate, says that he tries to make the same movement articulated for the approval of the project at the time: aligning the text to speed up the progress of the proposal .
“We already share the same text. I want to see if we can do something similar in the PNE so it doesn’t take too long, as it’s a controversial subject. We don’t want anything about ideology, political party, we want to see what is possible”, he told CNN.
National Education System
In an ideal scenario, Arns believes, the new PNE would be discussed with the National Education System already implemented.
The system would work to regulate the spheres of activity of each entity of the federation within the scope of Brazilian education. The bill regulating the measure has already been approved in the Senate.
For the senator, the lack of this guiding axis was the reason for the failure of the last PNE. “There was a lack of coordination and this needs to be changed. This aggravates the fact that the government is behind on the plan, which should have been discussed last year,” he points out.
