O orçamento público municipal entre reserva do possível e escolhas públicas: gastos sociais e melhoria na qualidade da educação fundamental da rede pública municipal em Santarém/PA

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aimed to analyze which were the public choices adopted by the municipality of Santarem, Pará, for municipal fundamental education, in the period 2018 and 2021, in face of the scarcity of resources and the public health emergency caused by the coronavirus. The right to fundamental education, which covers compulsory education for children and adolescents aged between 6 and 14 years, with a minimum duration of 9 years, is a constitutionally provided subjective public right, the realization of which is a priority for municipalities, which must allocate revenues in accordance with what was established by the constitutional and infra-constitutional legislation, so that public choices encompass for implementation of varied and well-distributed educational services for better municipal performance in educational development evaluations. In this way, government cations and programs must have the essential purpose of ensuring access, permanence and adequate learning, quality infrastructure, transport and school meals, valuing teaching professionals and strengthening democratic management councils. In the case of public fundamental education of Santarem, several territorial and social characteristics directly interfere with the amount of resources destined for the service, as well as the way they are distributed, and should be considered at the time of the public choice, since it is a municipality located in the interior of the Amazon, whose political management covers urban and rural areas (riverside, floodplain, river, and plateau), with a large territorial extension and different needs. Thus, it is necessary to verify how the priorities for fundamental education were organized in the municipal public budget in the aforementioned period, in order to understand, based on the local reality, how the scarcity of resources was faced and if the adopted strategies meant advances in the quality of municipal public fundamental education network, clarifying how such theoretical concepts – contingency reserve and public choices – interfered in the municipal reality. Thus, in relation to the methodological procedures, documents produced by the executive and legislative branches of Santarem were analyzed, to identify the public choices to, then, compare them to the results obtained in the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB). The results of this thesis indicate that during the analyzed period, there was a significant increase in investments in education, through the implementation of emergency public policies to guarantee the continuity of teaching through the necessary distance education modality in a pandemic context. It was also observed that most of these expenditures were not distributed among all essential segments for bolstering teaching and the comprehensive training of students. This includes valuing teaching professionals, bolstering social councils, promoting cultural and sports activities, as well as adapting school meals, among other important aspects.