Zonas de silêncio nas relações de trabalho docente na educação básica brasileira (2011-2024)

Abstract

This thesis aimed to understand the determinants of the contractual forms of the teaching workforce in state Basic Education in Brazil, with an emphasis on the expansion and the obscuring of data regarding the temporary hiring of teachers, in contrast to permanent positions. The research analyzes certain economic, political, and social determinants underlying this phenomenon, in connection with State reform, the export-oriented pattern of productive specialization of Brazilian dependent capitalism, demographic transition, and the increase of constant capital in the so-called “educational industry.” Through documentary analysis of the production of international organizations (UNESCO, World Bank, IDB) and national capital organizations—namely the Private Apparatus of Hegemony “Todos Pela Educação” Movement, as well as the mobile action fronts “Movimento Profissão Docente” and “Movimento Pessoas à Frente”. To understand the moments of capital in their regional and national derivations, the study draws on the content of 49 master’s dissertations and seven doctoral theses addressing temporary teachers and their contractual forms in Basic Education. We interrogate the zones of silences of capital through the analysis of official statistical data (Censo Escolar/INEP, RAIS, PNAD/IBGE). The findings demonstrate a shift in education state networks from 473,289 to 781,729 temporary teachers between 2011 and 2024, with substantial growth of temporary contracts in municipal systems and predominance in state systems, configuring a floating relative surplus population of teachers. We also observe a shift of the workforce from state systems to municipal and private systems in elementary education, alongside the maintenance of state systems as the main employer in secondary education. In early childhood education, there has been growth in the number of teachers in municipal and private systems. We identify zones of silence in bourgeois documents, which omit the centrality of reducing the wage mass allocated to teaching workers through reform proposals that deepen the fragmentation of the category. One such example is the long-term temporary contract, which allows greater control over teaching labor through large-scale testing, monitoring, and individual accountability of teachers for student outcomes. We propose as a hypothesis, to be investigated in future studies, that this constitutes one of the factors shaping the “new type” of teacher desired by bourgeois coalitions active in education. This would involve a teacher hired under a standardized contract term, who is not permanent but has provisional stability for six years, after which they undergo a new selection process, alongside increased ease of dismissal for striking workers by bourgeois organic intellectuals acting through performance evaluation and institutional fit criteria. It is concluded that contractual instability is a structural element of Brazilian dependent capitalism, with profound implications for reducing the wage mass allocated to teachers and fragmenting the teaching workforce. The expansion of temporary contractual forms has also provided room for a qualitative transformation in teaching work in the 2020s, as anticipated by the World Bank and representatives of local capital. We reject the hypothesis of a teacher shortage or a “possible teacher blackout,” which is both unfounded and somewhat cynical given the large contingent of teachers attempting to enter the profession but being excluded through selection processes. Finally, we demonstrate a trend toward the intensification and extension of teaching workloads, as well as the deepening of precarious conditions in access to schooling and knowledge in the country.