Banca de DEFESA: ALESSANDRA SILVA DA COSTA

“We would need a whole day care center just to meet the nursery waiting list” – offer, access and enrollment in day care centers. 

Nursery. Access to vacancies. Baixada Fluminense. mid-level bureaucrats 

COSTA, Alessandra Silva. “We would need a whole day care center just to meet the nursery waiting list” – offer, access and enrollment in day care centers. 2023. 161f. Dissertation (Master in Education, Contemporary Contexts and Popular Demands). PPGEduc, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Nova Iguaçu, RJ, 2023.           

The purpose of this research is to analyze access to vacancies in day care centers. The right of children to daycare was established as a public policy in the 1988 Constitution and reinforced in LDB 9394/96, which considered Early Childhood Education the first stage of basic education, with daycare being the segment aimed at babies and children up to 3 years old. It turns out that more than twenty-five years after the enactment of this right, in 2022, day care services did not materialize as a right for the broad Brazilian population. This research is based on the hypothesis that supply is less than demand and, therefore, many arrangements are carried out in the contexts of education departments and institutions. Knowing these arrangements and highlighting the strategies for distributing vacancies is the objective of this investigation. The theoretical framework is constructed in the interlocution between education, the sociology of organizations and the analysis of public policies. Access to daycare places, as well as other educational policies, takes place in an arena of disputes, in this sense, the cut proposed by the investigation, turns to the regulations and strategies of the networks in the definition of the distribution of vacancies, in the actions of the representatives of Early Childhood Education and the role that the directors of the institutions assume in the face of the implementation of this policy. In the theoretical framework adopted, the directors and these representatives work in the middle layer of the bureaucracy, being named as middle-ranking bureaucrats. The empirical field is the municipalities of the Baixada Fluminense that accepted the challenge of serving children under one year old in Early Childhood Education. Methodologically, this is a study with a qualitative approach that, through analysis of documents, questionnaires applied to representatives of the Early Childhood Education teams of the education departments and as well as interviews with directors of public daycare centers, intends to know the clashes, challenges and strategies used in the implementation of this policy. As a result, we verified through the questionnaires that although the efforts of the municipalities in complying with the legislation are recognized, one cannot fail to consider that, even fulfilling what determines the legal frameworks, many children still cannot conquer the right to day care, and wait on waiting lists; the number of children attended indicates that the municipalities are far from the PNE target for day care centers. Faced with the lack of vacancies in day care centers, municipalities carry out raffles and classification procedures, strategies that filter, through priority criteria, the selection of children. The data produced through the interviews indicate how much the managers, motivated to overcome the challenges that emerge in their daily lives, adopt practices, sometimes personal. In this way, they use their discretion as a means of organizing the stages formulated by the municipality's Department of Education, including to resolve the demand for vacancies. Thus, from these methodological instruments, it was possible to know the institutional arrangements and highlight the strategies of the Secretariats and the directorates of the day care centers.