Qualidade da educação nos questionários contextuais do SAEB 2023

Abstract

The quality of basic education constitutes one of the major challenges of contemporary educational policies, especially in contexts marked by profound social inequalities. In Brazil, the Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB) plays a central role in producing information on student performance; however, the index derived from this system is limited to indicators of student flow and proficiency, disregarding the contextual and structural data/information generated by the contextual questionnaires themselves. This limitation undermines the comprehension of educational quality from a socially referenced perspective. In this context, the present study aims at analyzing the questions of the SAEB 2023 contextual questionnaires in order to understand how they could produce information regarding the social quality of education. The research problem guiding the investigation is: which actual elements present in the questions of the SAEB 2023 contextual questionnaires could support the construction of basic education social quality indicators in Brazil? The hypothesis is that the elements contained in the SAEB 2023 contextual questionnaires could support the construction of indicators of the basic education social quality in the country. Methodologically, the study is characterized as documentary investigation developed through a qualitative, exploratory, and interpretative approach, employing Bardin’s content analysis, supported by the ATLAS.ti software for the coding and analysis of information. The corpus consists of the seven contextual questionnaires applied in the SAEB 2023 cycle. The results reveal an asymmetry in the distribution of information, with a predominance of data under the responsibility of school administration, while the perceptions of teachers and students appear in a limited or silenced manner. Furthermore, it can be observed that the design of these instruments and the subsequent appropriation of their data are shaped by a technical and managerial rationality, subordinating the formative, relational, and sociocultural dimensions of quality. It is concluded that, despite their limitations, the SAEB contextual questionnaires have the potential to support the construction of indicators of social quality, provided that they are reinterpreted beyond the meritocratic logic of the IDEB, thereby contributing to the right to education implementation, with dignity and equity.