Fundo Público e Direito á Educação: Um Estudo a Partir dos Gastos Públicos da União e do Município de Fortaleza

Abstract

It is not truth that the “minimum State”, consequence of the last cycle of economic liberalization, has as main characteristic a minor intervention in the economic area. Actually, in the point of view of Federal government funds, the State practically duplicated its size in the reform decade - 1990. These reforms radically changed the standard of distribution of the Government funds through a double movement: the “drying up” of the redistributive State’s side, incorporated to the original text of the Federal Constitution of 1988; and the “maximization” of State’s intervention through the direct remuneration of the capital. Considering that the constitutional guarantees for the financing of education, through the entailment of funds, represented an obstacle to the re-allocation of government resources, a series of measures had been taken to destroy them: the so called “unentailment of the Union funds”, the reduction of the under-entailment to basic education, the reiterated disobedience of the constitutional entailments, the tax policy that favors the not entailed tax revenues and the FUNDEF, that caused the acceleration of the municipal attendance with a fewer participation of the Union in the maintenance of basic education. These measures had great impact in the educational reality of Fortaleza, where the municipal system doubled its attendance in less than one decade, which made the gap between the existing physical organization and the right to a minimum standard of quality of education even worse. However, it is not possible to see a modification, similar to the occurred in the Union, in the standard of the distribution of municipal government funds. At the municipal level, the expenditures with education have remained steady in recent years. Therefore, the result of the last reforms was the gradual reduction of the cost per student in basic education, characterizing the “generalization with impoverishment” of the public education