Banca de DEFESA: PATRICIA FERREIRA DUARTE

THE CENTER FOR INNOVATION IN BRAZILIAN EDUCATION (CIEB): ASSUMPTIONS AND BUSINESS STRATEGIES FOR BASIC EDUCATION

Keywords: educational policies; CIEB; digitalization of education, privatization of education.

The 2008 crisis demanded from the capital a movement to rebuild the foundations of accumulation and new strategies to reorganize bourgeois sociability. One of the strategies chosen for capital recovery, was increased investment in BigTechs, alongside the implementation of austerity plans, which include a reduction in resources for social areas, such as education. At the same time, technologies have taken center stage in global educational agendas, reconfigured under the influence of new private organizations (Saura et al., 2024). Among these organizations, the work of the Center for Innovation in Brazilian Education (CIEB) stands out: an association of private institutes and foundations that, since 2016, has advised municipal and state departments and the Ministry of Education to promote the "innovation culture". CIEB also positions itself as a "point of conection", aiming to strengthen what it calls for "innovation ecosystem". In this context, the following questions emerge: What elements constituted the context for the formation of the "Innovation Center"? What is the content of the CIEB's educational assumptions? What strategies did this APH mobilize to compete for the national digitalization agenda? To answer these questions, we established as a general objective to understand the form and content of the CIEB's intervention. Specifically, we aimed to: i) analyze the slogan of educational innovation, identifying the ethical-political project it imprints on human development; ii) produce an overview of digitalization policies at a global level; iii) map the composition of the CIEB, its principles, and strategies for disseminating its assumptions; and iv) analyze the concepts and proposals that constitute its project for the digitalization of brazilian education. The theoretical framework of this research, qualitative and documentary, is based on historical-dialectical materialism and the understanding of the Integral State as a theoretical and methodological tool. Three research methodologies were combined: bibliographic survey, systematic literature review, and document analysis. The study identified that innovation is act as a slogan and ideology for disseminating the Silicon Valley ideology, where techno-solutionism predominates. This ideology was imported by CIEB and adapted to the brazilian reality. Publications, tools, and partnerships, established with civil society and the political community, have given it a strategic position in educational reforms, successfully resonating with its premises. By fostering what it calls an "innovation ecosystem", the organization has mobilized entrepreneurs from the edtech industry, garnering efforts and paving the way for the sector's connection with public education systems. We conclude that, in this process, schools are being reconfigured in three dimensions: as a "niche" of the edtech market, as a means of conforming to the sociability of capitalism in its digital age, and as a place for the consumption and production of digital commodities.

Keywords: educational policies; CIEB; digitalization of education, privatization of education.