BRAZILIAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION QUALITY: SOME RESEARCHRESULTS. This paper discusses data obtained from a review of empirical studies on the quality of early childhood education in brazil published between 1996 and 2003.The sources were the main education journals published in the country and the papers presented at the most important scientific meeting of the area, The National Association of Graduate Studies and Research on Education (ANPEd) Annual Congress, Work Group on Education of 0-6 Year-Old Children (WG 7). The information gathered was selected according to main criteria for assessment of early childhood education quality as published in the literature: teacher education; curricula; infrastructure; educational practices, and relationships between schools and families.
_____This study is the result of a review conducted for the Early Childhood Policy Review Project sponsored by UNESCO and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This project is part of a comparative diagnosis including three other countries: Kazakhstan, Kenya and Indonesia.
2The general picture of early childhood education systems described in this review suggests a dynamic but contradictory reality characterized by an enormous distance between existing legal frameworks and the real day-to-day situations confronted by the majority of children and adults in early childhood education institutions.
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION -TEACHER EDUCATION -TEACHING QUALITY -RESEARCHDiscussions on the quality of education for 0-6 year-old children offered by early childhood education institutions were given impetus in the 1990s on the wake of political and legal changes brought about during the country's redemocratization.The late 1970s and the 1980s saw civil society mobilization demanding that the right to education be extended to young children: neighborhood and workers' union movements struggled for access to day care centers in big cities; professional groups and education experts mobilized to propose new regulations; local governments tried to meet the increasing demand by building and/or expanding municipal day care centers and preschools. From the perspective of grassroots movements, the struggle for day care centers was regarded as the right of working mothers to child care and education; other movements, including those advocating children and adolescent rights, struggled for day care for children of vulnerable, at-risk families (Campos, 1999).The quality of Brazilian early childhood education was no priority at all in this period: day care center system expansion was boosted mainly through government funding of nonprofit and/or community organizations that often operated in poor conditions; municipal preschools increased the number of enrollments often by expanding the number of children per classroom and/or daily school shifts. This is the case of the city of São Paulo, where Municipal Preschools (EMEIS) for children aged four to six offer three daily school shifts (from 7 to 11 AM; from 11 AM to 3 PM, and fro...