Educational Policies in Brazil: Tensions between Union’s Regulation and Autonomy of Sub-National Federative Units

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Union's (Federal Government's) assistance policy to the sub-national federated units (States and Municipalities), from 2004 to 2014, for the provision of basic education in Brazil. The paper discusses the tensions between the federal government policies for technical and financial support to federated units, and the autonomy of the federated units to formulate and implement their own educational policies. The federal government policies implemented since 2004 includes diverse mechanisms for directing the educational policies of sub-national governments and for reducing inequalities in the educational provision. Such approach ended up affecting the degree of autonomy of the federated units and, therefore, tension was created between the two policies. The investigation showed that, although the new assistance policy promoted an increase in the amount of resources transferred to the Northern and Northeastern regions of Brazil, it was not enough to modify the inequality condition. Important discovery of needs for additional research includes the identification of the root causes of, one, the limited management capabilities of Municipality personnel to implement the policies and, two, the actual root causes of the inequalities themselves.