A New Stage in Affirmative Actions in Education
This article was written by Rosana Heringer, professor at the Faculty of Education at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro , Coordinator of theLaboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education, and associate researcher at the Washington Brazil Office for issue 95 of the WBO weekly newsletter on December 1, 2023. To subscribe to the newsletter, simply enter your email in the form at the end of the article.
When sanctioning the new quota law on November 13, 2023, in a ceremony at Palácio do Planalto, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated that all public policy, no matter how good it is, is always subject to improvements and adjustments. This was the general spirit of the ceremony for Law 14,723/2023, which modifies and improves affirmative action policies for the admission of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Quilombola, public school, lower-income and disabled students into universities and other federal institutions of higher education and secondary technical education. Let's briefly go over the main changes made to Law 12,711, the well-known Quota Law, of 2012.
We can summarize the changes made to the previous law in ten points, presented here in four large groups, namely: a) changes in relation to the program's audience; b) changes in relation to implementation mechanisms; c) changes in relation to the monitoring of affirmative actions; and d) innovations.
With regard to the target audience of the affirmative action program, the main change concerns the inclusion of Quilombola students (people from communities of former enslaved Afro-Brazilians0 among the benefited groups, alongside Black, mixed-race and Indigenous students, lower-income students from public schools, and those with specific deficiencies. This measure meets a demand for recognition of the ethnic and cultural specificity of this group, which is still little considered in targeted policies. This measure is incredibly important given that for the first time the country collected data on the Quilombola population in a demographic census, enabling better knowledge of this group.
In regard to the target audience of the affirmative action program, the new law redefined the income cutoff, reducing the maximum income limit for qualification from 1.5 to 1 minimum wage per capita. In doing so, legislators were aware of the fact already identified in several studies that point to the need for greater focus on the poorest students, so that the policy actually contributes to reducing socioeconomic inequalities in access.
In relation to implementation mechanisms, the most notable advance of the new law in comparison to the previous one is the availability of widely competitive vacancies for all students competing in the Unified Selection System. This measure means that candidates benefiting from affirmative action compete for reserved spots only if they are not approved in the general selection. As several researchers and activists in this field have emphasized, this measure allows quotas to be “a floor and not a ceiling”, expanding the entry possibilities for students benefiting from affirmative action. This group will also have priority in the allocation of spots not filled by other methods. A final point in relation to mechanisms refers to the need to update population data after the last demographic census, opening the possibility of using other official databases for this update.
The recently enacted law also improves guidelines in relation to defining the forms of its monitoring and evaluation, a point widely highlighted as absent in relation to the implementation of Law 12,711. For various reasons, the federal executive has not developed the necessary tools to carry out this monitoring since 2013, which was aggravated in the period 2019-2022, leading to an effective “blackout” of possible monitoring instances precisely at the moment when the law completed ten years of implementation. As a response to this situation, Law 14,723 provides improved guidelines for monitoring and evaluation by the Ministry of Education, together with other bodies of the federal government, with evaluation scheduled every ten years and publication of annual monitoring reports.
Finally, we must discuss the item we call innovation, which concerns two specific aspects that have been debated by experts and also in federal higher education institutions. The first refers to the anticipated adoption of affirmative action policies in postgraduate programs. This forecast formalizes the recommendation that the Ministry of Education and Culture had made in 2016, guiding the adoption of these programs and integrating them with the set of affirmative actions in higher education.
The other measure provides quota students who are in a vulnerable situation at the time of entering higher education a priority when it comes to receiving assistance. Although we know that this and other measures provided for in the law are subject to regulation, we highlight the importance of this guidance that aims to provide groups benefiting from entering higher education with the necessary support to remain at the university. The importance of permanence conditions being perceived as part of affirmative actions is widely recognized in several studies, guaranteeing special attention to students from these specific groups.
In summary, we can say that law 14,723, by promoting changes to law 12,711, improves mechanisms and also innovates in specific aspects, including new benefiting groups and new monitoring mechanisms.
On the other hand, studies on the topic and also the practice of university management demonstrate that some aspects relating to the full implementation of affirmative actions in federal higher education institutions remain a challenge and should be the object of attention in the day-to-day activities of institutions. Here we highlight, for example, the issue of hetero-identification committees, a topic on which the new legislation does not comment, therefore remaining something under the responsibility of each institution.
We also draw attention to aspects linked to the training, from an anti-racist perspective, of members of university communities and other federal educational institutions and the need to strengthen the internal management bodies responsible for affirmative actions in each institution, which need to be better equipped in terms of human resources, budget, and legitimacy within the scope of university management.
Law 14,723 inaugurates a new moment in the implementation of affirmative actions in Brazil and represents an important stage in this long path of historical reparation and the search for racial equality in the country. With the approved changes, the responsibility of everyone involved in implementing and monitoring these programs also grows, as well as the need for our institutions to build anti-racist academic environments committed to Brazilian diversity in its various dimensions.
