Educação infantil no município de Limeira – SP: um estudo comparativo do desempenho de alunos de creches e pré- escolas nos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This study discusses children´s education in the context of the Municipal Education Network in Limeira, aiming to answer two main questions: would there be a mismatch between learning skills and academic performance among students coming from child centers (day care centers) and those from Municipal Children´s schools (pre-schools), shown by education managers and teachers of first grade in elementary schools? Does the evaluation performed by these professionals really correspond to the actual academic performance framework of these students? In order to attend to these two questions of investigation, we chose two schools of Limeira´s Education Network - a child center (day care center) and a Municipal Children´s School - EMEI (pre-school), focusing the research on the following objectives: (I) carry out a comparative study of the performance results through somative evaluation tests of Portuguese Language and Mathematics, given twice a month by the schools of municipal basic education to the students coming from EMEIs and from Child Centers, in order to validate, or not, the evaluation made by teachers and education managers, (II) investigate the possible causes, responsible for the mentioned discrepancy of learning, by means of semi-structured interviews with children´s education managers and focus group with teachers who teach first grade students. Surprisingly, the findings of the exploratory study revealed that the students coming from Child Centers presented a similar performance and, in some cases, even superior to that from EMEIs, differently from the records presented by the teachers and education managers of basic school. The study also indicated three main causes to explain that mistaken evaluation: (1) the presence of different concepts of children´s education in the network, (2) the lack of articulation between children´s education and primary school, (3) the lack of qualification of the teachers who work in early childhood´s education (teachers and managers). In regard to the findings of the research and the remarks made during this study, we proposed a Plan of Educational Action (PAE) in order to overcome these identified problems. All the work was accompanied by survey and bibliographic review about the influence of the historic process and the compliance to legislation in the day care centers and pre-schools at a national and municipal level.