School funding challenges in Brazil from a multidisciplinary perspective

Abstract

The special issue Education and its Interfaces with Administration, Accounting, and Economics appears at a challenging time for Brazilian school funding because of the implementation process of the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and for the Valorization of Education Professionals (Fundeb in Portuguese acronym), which became a permanent mechanism after the enactment of the Constitutional Amendment No. 108/2020. The Fundeb redistributed 65.5% of the total resources destined to finance Brazilian public schools in 2019. Therefore, it is a fundamental mechanism for guaranteeing the right to education for 39.3 million students (82.1% of the total of enrollments of kindergarten, preschool, elementary, and secondary school). In this context, this article presents the contributions of the 10 articles included in the special issue vis-à-vis the current challenges of Brazilian school funding aligned with the following themes: (a) Educational costs; Cost-Student Quality (CAQ in Portuguese acronym); and inequalities in educational conditions between schools and education networks; (b) Equity mechanisms for financing policies; (c) Federalism and inequalities in funding capacity; (d) Political dynamics and the parliamentary decision-making process in Fundeb's legislative approval processes; (e) Legal nature of expenditure on maintenance and development of education; (f) Educational federalism and governance of the National Education Plan; (g) Funding, remuneration and teacher valorization; and (h) School Funding in Southern Common Market (Mercosul in Portuguese acronym) from a comparative perspective.