The city of Santo André, in ABC Paulista, recently won the state stage of the Good Practices Award of the National Literacy Child Commitment, becoming one of the municipalities that best structured management, monitoring and literacy policies in early childhood.
The result has caused repercussions among managers in other states: the city transformed strategic planning into public policy capable of changing, in a few years, the learning curve of the entire network.
Literacy in the classroom
In a national scenario marked by persistent challenges – between territories, a drop in post-pandemic proficiency and difficulty in consolidating literacy processes until the 2nd year – the city of São Paulo with almost 750 thousand inhabitants appears as an exception.
And not by adopting an isolated action, but by articulating an educational management system that integrates continuous diagnosis, goals by school and by class, municipal assessment aligned with Saresp, continued in-service training and standardized instruments for monitoring .
“When an educational network makes decisions guided by evidence, the result stops being occasional and becomes structural. This shows that planning and continuous monitoring not only raise indicators but are capable of changing the learning of a generation”, says Mayor Gilvan Ferreira.
With 65 schools and around 20 thousand in the initial years, the network began to operate with a common language between units and organize decisions based on data.
The effect appeared in the numbers:
- Literate Child Indicator rose from 52.8 to 56.5.
- IDEB advanced from 6.3 to 6.5, considering the national comparison between 2019 and 2023.
- Proficiency jumped from 62% to 76% in Portuguese and from 64% to 73% in Mathematics in internal assessments.
- Age-grade distortion fell to 2.4%.
- 54 schools grew in the Educational Excellence Index in 2024
- The approval rate increased, with a significant drop in nominations to the Cycle Council.
What do the experts say?
For experts who follow the progress of municipalities in the Literate Child program, Santo André’s difference lies in the rare combination of governance, method and continuity – three factors that, together, usually determine the success or failure of literacy policies in Brazil.
The city first won the stage of its hub — which brings together part of the 645 municipalities in São Paulo, and was later considered the best initiative in the state precisely because it presents what evaluators consider the “gold standard” of public policy: systemic monitoring, results-oriented management and the ability to quickly correct trajectories.
Furthermore, the municipality invested in pedagogical infrastructure, such as the literary collection, ongoing training and active supervision processes, allowing teachers to have real conditions to intervene in learning difficulties in the first months of the school year.
The model, now awarded, should enter the radar of other capitals and medium-sized cities seeking to recover post-pandemic losses and accelerate literacy. Nationally, the topic is gaining traction because the federal government has expanded goals and financial incentives for municipalities that demonstrate the ability to monitor and improve their learning indicators.
*Published by André Nicolau, from CNN Brasil
