Evasão escolar na Educação de Jovens e Adultos: um estudo na rede estadual de ensino de Pernambuco

A evasão escolar constitui um dos maiores problemas para as redes de ensino, em diferentes níveis e modalidades. O tratamento da problemática da evasão, no contexto da Educação de Jovens e Adultos, exige uma abordagem particularizada, tendo em vista que a própria modalidade existe como resultado desse fenômeno. Neste sentido, buscamos neste trabalho investigar os aspectos que influenciam a ocorrência da evasão escolar na EJA, no âmbito da Rede Estadual de Ensino de Pernambuco. O enfoque do estudo esteve voltado para compreender a questão a partir dos olhares de estudantes, professores e gestores escolares. Os participantes do estudo indicaram que a evasão escolar dos estudantes da EJA ocorre, principalmente, em decorrência de aspectos externos às escolas. Os dados também apontaram que a permanência pode ser impactada por ações didáticas, que promovam o fortalecimento e a visibilidade da EJA na comunidade escolar.Palavras-chave: Educação de Jovens e Adultos; Evasão escolar; Direito à educação; Permanência na escola.Student dropout in the Youth and Adult Education: a study in the public school system of PernambucoABSTRACTStudent dropout is one of the biggest problems for teaching networks at different levels and modalities. The treatment of the problem of student dropout in the context of Youth and Adult Education (YAE) requires a particularized approach because the modality itself exists as a result of this phenomenon. In this sense, we seek to investigate the aspects that influence the occurrence of student dropout in the YAE within the public school system of the state of Pernambuco. The focus of the study was to understand the issue from the perspectives of students, teachers and school managers. The study participants indicated that student dropout of YAE students occurs due to external aspects of schools. The data indicated that permanence can be impacted by didactic actions that promote the strengthening and visibility of YAE in school community.Keywords: Youth and Adult Education; Student dropout; Right to education; Stay in School.Deserción escolar en la Educación de Jóvenes y Adultos: un estudio en la red pública de enseñanza de PernambucoRESUMENLa deserción escolar es uno de los mayores problemas en las redes de enseñanza en diferentes niveles y modalidades. El tratamiento del problema de la deserción escolar en el contexto de la Educación de Jóvenes yAdultos (EJA) requiere un enfoque particularizado porque la modalidad en sí existe como resultado de este fenómeno. En este sentido, buscamos investigar los aspectos que influyen en la ocurrencia de la deserción escolar en la EJA en la red pública de enseñanza en el estado de Pernambuco. El enfoque del estudio fue comprender el tema desde las perspectivas de los estudiantes, profesores y gestores escolares. Los participantes del estudio indicaron que la deserción escolar de los estudiantes de la EJA se produce debido a aspectos externos de las escuelas. Los datos indicaron que la permanencia puede ser afectado por acciones didácticas que promuevan el fortalecimiento y la visibilidad de la EJA en la comunidad escolar. Palabras clave: Educación de Jóvenes y Adultos; Deserción escolar; Derecho a la educación; Permanencia en la escuela.

Philanthropy to the rescue? Detroit’s schools and urban policymaking under austerity

As municipal governments in the US struggle under austerity, philanthropic elites have seemingly come to the rescue. Their money has not come without strings attached, however. By leveraging political contributions and donations to non-profits, philanthropists have moved beyond funding services and into the promotion of their preferred policies to cash-strapped municipalities. This has meant that the super-wealthy can now set the terrain of urban policy debates in cities struggling under austerity, ignoring democratic processes and often working to actively co-opt or stifle dissent. Through a study of the politics surrounding an impending bankruptcy of the Detroit public school system in the mid-2010s, this article provides crucial insights into the nature of elite-led urban policymaking under conditions of racialized austerity. Specifically, it focuses on how competing coalitions of liberal and conservative philanthropists used their wealth and influence to define the parameters of the policy debate over the future of Detroit’s schools. In doing so, these coalitions constrained the ability of residents with alternative visions to participate in decision-making processes and promoted a market-based system of schooling that served Detroit students poorly. This result must be understood as facilitated by the city’s context of racialized austerity, as manifested both through the financial crisis facing Detroit’s schools and through the system of emergency management used to take over Michigan’s majority-Black municipal institutions. These findings highlight that as philanthropic funding and influence have grown under conditions of racialized austerity, we must critically examine their effects on policymaking and on systems of democratic accountability.

A Choice Too Far: Transit Difficulty and Early High School Transfer

The challenge of a long and difficult commute to school each day is likely to wear on students leading some to change schools. We use administrative data from approximately 3,900 students in the Baltimore City Public School System in 2014-15 to estimate the relationship between travel time on public transportation and school transfer during the 9th grade. We show that students who have relatively more difficult commutes are more likely to transfer than peers in the same school with less difficult commutes. Moreover, we find that when these students change schools, their newly enrolled school is substantially closer to home, requires fewer vehicle transfers, and is less likely to have been included among their initial set of school choices.

Colonizing the Mind: Hawaiian History, Americanization, and Manual Training in Hawaiʻi’s Public Schools, 1913–1940

Background/Context: Current historical understanding of Hawaiʻi’s territorial period celebrates American education as a crucial influence on the islands’ political development. In particular, the territory’s public school system represents an essential institution for spreading democratic freedom, fostering social mobility, and, more importantly, establishing America’s presence as a positive influence on Hawaiʻi’s political destiny. There has yet, however, to be a critical look at how White territorial school leaders used the public school system as a settler colonial institution with the intent of producing a compliant non-White population accepting of the nation’s racially stratified social, political, and economic systems of inequality. Focus of Study: Making Hawaiʻi American was about controlling the islands’ past and determining its future. Cultivating consent, as this article contends, was a critical strategy to reach this end. White school officials used their uncontestable authority to uproot local history and social systems and replace them with narratives affirming American exceptionalism and racial segregation. Throughout the territorial period (1900–1959), they designed and supported formal and informal schooling practices and policies to inculcate Hawaiʻi’s majority nonwhite students with American values, norms of behavior, and political beliefs to socially engineer acceptance of White American authority and racial hierarchy. Through repetition and enforcement of these practices and policies, they sought to replace the unfavorable local memory of American involvement in the forced 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and Native protests over U.S. annexation in 1898 with an affirmative, progressive narrative justifying America’s presence and jurisdiction as a beneficent enterprise. Research Design: This article brings historical inquiry to this topic and uses archival materials from the University Archives and Pacific-Hawaiian Collections at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Those include the entire collection of the Hawaii Educational Review, correspondence and memos produced by schoolmen (White male school officials and administrators), and newspaper clippings. It also draws on secondary literature to help further contextualize this topic. Conclusions/Recommendations: The history of White educators in territorial Hawaiʻi reveals how public education under their leadership constituted a colonizing project designed to limit student opportunities and determine their futures. The challenge for scholars and educators is not to consign such histories to mere reflections on past mistakes but to identify how forms of oppressive education continue to manifest in schools today and impact student lives.

“No Words for Sinners” and “Jeriah”

This is a set of poems I wrote about my experiences with a group of students I taught two years in a row as I examined how the public school system was and is broken.

Seroprevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies in the staff of a public school system in the midwestern United States

Since March 2020, the United States has lost over 580,000 lives to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19. A growing body of literature describes population-level SARS-CoV-2 exposure, but studies of antibody seroprevalence within school systems are critically lacking, hampering evidence-based discussions on school reopenings. The Lake Central School Corporation (LCSC), a public school system in suburban Indiana, USA, assessed SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in its staff and identified correlations between seropositivity and subjective histories and demographics. This study is a cross-sectional, population-based analysis of the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in LCSC staff measured in July 2020. We tested for seroprevalence with the Abbott Alinity™ SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibody test. The primary outcome was the total seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2, and secondary outcomes included trends of antibody presence in relation to baseline attributes. 753 participants representative of the staff at large were enrolled. 22 participants (2.9%, 95% CI: 1.8% - 4.4%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Correcting for test performance parameters, the seroprevalence is estimated at 1.7% (90% Credible Interval: 0.27% - 3.3%). Multivariable logistic regression including mask wearing, travel history, symptom history, and contact history revealed a 48-fold increase in the odds of seropositivity if an individual previously tested positive for COVID-19 (OR: 48, 95% CI: 4–600). Amongst individuals with no previous positive test, exposure to a person diagnosed with COVID-19 increased the odds of seropositivity by 7-fold (OR: 7.2, 95% CI: 2.6–19). Assuming the presence of antibodies is associated with immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection, these results demonstrate a broad lack of herd immunity amongst the school corporation’s staff irrespective of employment role or location. Protective measures like contact tracing, face coverings, and social distancing are therefore vital to maintaining the safety of both students and staff as the school year progresses.

Divulgação científica sobre os fósseis de Picos, Piauí

O município de Picos, na mesorregião sudeste do Estado do Piauí, Brasil, destaca-se pela grande diversidade fossilífera, representada principalmente por fósseis marinhos com idade em torno de 380 milhões de anos, pertencentes ao período geológico conhecido como Devoniano. Para difundir o conhecimento sobre esse tema, pesquisadores do Laboratório de Paleontologia da Universidade Federal do Piauí (UFPI), Campus Senador Helvídio Nunes de Barros, desenvolveram um projeto de divulgação científica sobre paleontologia em escolas públicas do município de Picos, com ênfase no patrimônio paleontológico local. Foram realizadas oito intervenções compostas por oficinas pedagógicas para crianças, palestras temáticas e exposições itinerantes de fósseis, para adolescentes e adultos da rede pública de educação, em oito unidades escolares, totalizando um público de 1.160 integrantes da comunidade escolar. Essas intervenções constituem parte de um programa de popularização da ciência paleontológica intitulado Programa de Divulgação Científica em Paleontologia na rede pública de ensino de Picos, Piauí, que visa facilitar o acesso à ciência, incentivar a preservação dos fósseis, e fomentar o desenvolvimento de uma relação de identidade cultural com o patrimônio fossilífero da região. Palavras-chave: Paleontologia; Popularização da Ciência; Nordeste do Brasil Scientific disclosure about fossils in Picos, Piauí Abstract: The Picos municipality in the southeastern mesoregion of the Piauí State, Brazil, stands out for the large fossiliferous diversity represented mainly by marine fossils aged around 380 million years, from the geological period known as Devonian. To disseminate knowledge on the subject, researchers from the Laboratório de Paleontologia da Universidade Federal do Piauí (UFPI), Campus Senador Helvídio Nunes de Barros, developed a project for the scientific divulgation on paleontology in public schools in the municipality of Picos, with an emphasis on the local paleontological heritage. Eight interventions were carried out, composed of pedagogical workshops for children, thematic lectures, and itinerant exhibitions of fossils for adolescents and adults from the public-school system in eight school units, totaling an audience of 1,160 members of the school community. These interventions are part of a program for the popularization of paleontological science entitled the Program for Scientific Dissemination in Paleontology in the public-school system of Picos, Piauí (Brazil), which aims to facilitate access to science, encourage the preservation of fossils, and foster the development of a relationship of cultural identity with the region's fossiliferous heritage. Keywords: Paleontology; Science Popularization; Northeast Brazil

Inclusion in the Classroom : Examining Feelings of Inclusion of Newcomer and Aboriginal Students in Ontario's Public School System

Although schools have the potential to be inclusive spaces for children and youth from all backgrounds, the current study has found that in Ontario, newcomer and Aboriginal students’ perceptions of inclusion differ from those of their non-newcomer and non-Aboriginal counterparts. Through the analysis of a survey conducted in 2009 students enrolled in public, private or Catholic schools from grade 6 through 12, this essay compares the feelings of inclusion of newcomer and Aboriginal students in Ontario to those not falling within these two categories. Further, it determines whether or not the feelings of inclusion exhibited by the respondents in Ontario were similar to or different from those of their counterparts in the rest of the provinces. Interestingly, though newcomers in Ontario were actually found to feel more included in their schools than their non-newcomer counterparts, this was not the case in the rest of Canada, but, while Aboriginal students felt less included than their non-Aboriginal counterparts in all provinces, in Ontario the gap between the two groups was wider. This essay examines these findings and makes suggestions for improving inclusivity in Ontario’s school system. Key words: social inclusion; social exclusion; schools; newcomer children and youth; Aboriginal children and youth; colonialism.