Brazil made a natural transition to giving public school only to poor people at the 70's and early 80's, thanks to our conservative dictatorship, which stopped funding them properly and simply gave up managing them. The result was that poor people now receives a pitiful education, riches and high middle class receive a decent one and the middle class generally receive a bad one and even have to pay for it.
I thought Brazil began significantly modernizing its schools around early 2000s? Or am I mistaken.
Educational policies are of that type on which years are spent until you're able to see improvement. Beside this, there is a division of responsibilities between the three 'power spheres', as we call it, on which the federal government is only obliged to provide superior education, the states middle education, and the municipalities primary one. This doesn't mean that they cannot provide the others, and the best high school is a federal one (even better than any of the expensive private ones) while the best university is a state one. But the bulk of the system works like that.
The federal instances are doing great, and they were able to improve the university system to its better shape ever, even after FHC and Paulo Renato de Souza's huge effort to destroy it and substitute for a profit based one.
The municipal ones... Well, I really concluded that municipalities shouldn't run them, specially after the efforts of the federal government to improve them, which seems to work, but this is not the generation that will be saved by education. The military took a decade and a half to destroy basic education, it won't be put up again so easily.
As for state level high schools, at least in my state It will be necessary to fight the huge efforts PSDB does to destroy them. I'll die without knowing what's their motivation to be so obnoxious about education. Damn it! That party was founded by professors and intellectuals, and we needed a demi-analphabet president to make something.
