New Public Management and the Centralization of Educational Assessment Policy in Brazil: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Educational Field

This text aims to analyze the conditionalities of the New Public Management for the educational assessment policy in Brazil and the deepening of educational inequality with the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Certainly, within the trajectory of educational policies, Brazil has a clear relationship with the conservative way in which the State and society were shaped. In the current scenario of the New Public Management, the new educational policy dictates an economic logic in the pedagogical factor, which uses business management methods for results, transforming it as a solution to measure the quality of teaching, for which it uses evaluation mechanisms. Aspects linked to the New Public Management such as efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness permeate the rationality of educational policy and, consequently, of the evaluative logic. Indeed, the centrality of the assessment conditioned the logic of curriculum standardization. These curriculum guidance indicators denote training based on skills and abilities that contribute to training that meets market demands.


Introduction
The new public management model, which focuses on results-oriented management, is attributed to the State's success. Incorporated into the country in the 1990s, the new management is the result of a process of propagation of neoliberal ideas. Linked to the educational field, the new management promotes control guided by results, namely: the decentralization of actions and the community's responsibility for the success or failure of students.
Measures to establish a new management emerged as solutions to criticisms of the current bureaucracy within public administration. In the context of New Public Management, it is understood that globalization and competitiveness have encouraged this new management model based on competition and a focus on results, proposing a focused reform agenda, according to Andion (2012, p. 8), "the decline of the State apparatus; deregulation; fiscal control, privatization of public companies and the application of business techniques in the government sphere".
This text aims to analyze the conditionalities of the New Public Management for the educational assessment policy in Brazil and the deepening of educational inequality with the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Certainly, within the trajectory of educational policies, Brazil has a clear relationship with the conservative way in which the State and society were shaped. In the current scenario of the New Public Management, the new educational policy dictates an economic logic in the pedagogical factor, which uses business management methods for results, transforming it as a solution to measure the quality of teaching, using evaluative mechanisms for this.

New Public Management and its effects on education, as well as on educational policies
At the end of the 20th century, developed countries appropriated educational methods initially based on modernization parameters, seeking to create a public education system added to a time when the right to education would be popularized. Certainly, after the period of educational standardization and the growing criticism of the diversity of education systems, there was a "desire for impartial issues in the training offered, in the academic effectiveness of school systems and in the accommodation to society and the containment of knowledge" (Lessard & Carpentier, 2016, p. 110).
According to De Paula et al. (2020), the education systems, therefore, started to receive a great pressure in the search for an evolution in education and for this model to comply with orders given by the economic and social power, thus being a more recent extension composed of educational policies. This process starts from the linking of the New Public Management within the management of educational systems.
Indeed, it is feasible to consider that the New Public Management is effectively composed of new possibilities for thinking about private administrative organization, based on the practices and principles indicated by international bodies, according to the experiences of Great-British countries. In these circumstances, Souza (2015) argues that neoliberalism radiated on a global scale has brought about transformations in the link between State and society, as well as the emphasis on market privileges recognized by public management, exposing, from various themes, the administration of this new model management. The practice of accountability is one of the particularities of the new public management alternative. To facilitate the understanding related to the meaning of this phenomenon and how its administrative model was today, it is necessary to have as a basis the chronological performance and the aspects that the management appropriates in different situations. Given the new model of public management, changes were needed that brought changes in the forms of organization and management at school. These changes are justified by the need to modernize management in order to follow the egalitarian and universal guidelines specified in the Federal Constitution of 1988, in view of the measures that promote greater autonomy for systems and schools. Thus, it is worth emphasizing school education as one of the pillars for national development, as well as a necessary instrument to build a society. Thus, [...] education is recognized as a social right of access to a public good, therefore, related to the fundamental principles of human dignity and the exercise of citizenship. As a social right, it is the duty of the state to guarantee it to all citizens in order to respond and correspond to the aspirations and aspirations of society, and the concept of education for citizenship imposes itself as a political and pedagogical requirement for school fulfills its social function. (Machado & Falsarella, 2020, p. 4).
In addition, there are some specific duties of the Union: to organize, maintain and develop the official bodies and institutions of the federal education system and those of the territories; linked to this, the States, Federal District and municipalities must: elaborate -in the current panorama, that is, fulfill the goals and strategies -a National Education Plan and establish guidelines that guide the basic education curricula. In these circumstances, systematize the federative regime to consolidate a national education system.
Within education, management corresponds to the struggle of social movements for a free and quality public school, as also expressed in the Federal Constitution of 1988, in art. 205: Art. 205. Education, a right for all and a duty of the State and the family, will be promoted and encouraged with the collaboration of society, aiming at the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship and his qualification for work.
Education as a right is a factor of social development, which underpins the educational right of everyone, especially those who need it most, such as: children in precarious situations, rural populations, ethnic minorities, women and people in a state of vulnerability. When talking about social movements, it is necessary to understand the term public policy. Politics is a word of Greek origin, politikó, which expresses the condition of participation of the person who is free in decisions about the direction of the city, the polis. Meanwhile, the word public is of Latin origin, publica, which means people, of the people. Thus, seen from the etymological point of view, public policy describes the participation of the people in the city's decisions.
It is with the demand and imposition of society that public policies emerge. Public policies can be composed of: laws, regulations, plans, budgets and guidelines; which aim to determine the objectives and the implementation of the imposed actions.
Making a brief recap, within the trajectory of educational policies, Brazil has a clear relationship with the conservative way in which the State and society were shaped. Thus, in the social scenario, an agro-exporting economic model and slave labor were concentrated, while the concern with the right to education appeared late. As educator Anísio Teixeira points out: "Without wanting to go too far into the past, we must remember that, throughout the colony, we lived a type of government of an absolutist nature, with education reduced to confessional schools, predominantly destined to training the clergy" (Teixeira, 1967, p. 70).
Only in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century did the State point to education as necessary for the country's development. The State's priority in the 1990s was to ensure access to school, as well as the permanence, thus, the development of programs such as: Wake up Brazil, It's time for school! Acceleration of Learning, Textbook Guide -1st to 4th grades, and the most effective: Bolsa Escola, whose objective was to pay a monthly stipend in cash to families of young people and low-income children whose per capita income is less than one minimum stipulated by the program, as an incentive for them to attend school regularly.
While public policies are directed towards Education, one of the main guidelines of the New Public Management is the efficiency of results-oriented management, as well as the emphasis on the quality of the curriculum and focus on the participation of parents to achieve excellence in teaching. The premise of this change in the organization is based on the idea that competition enables healthy pressures to improve the educational system. Thus, starting from this sense, competition between schools provides incentives for the core of employees and, thus, stimulates the improvement of the efficiency and quality of the educational system.
One of the regulatory mechanisms that provide information about the goals to be achieved by educational institutions is the external evaluation. It is through it that management is examined, and thus to know how good the performance of students is, as well as the efficiency of the educational system on a large scale. However, such a method based on rationality, efficiency and demand for results, which fails to consider economic, regional and cultural differences, thus, there is a need for actions that truly promote inclusive education. As pointed out by Machado and Falsarella (2020), when referring to the internal organization of the school, its particularities, needs and resources need to be considered in the elaboration of educational policies, so that the results of assessments cannot be used as the only measuring instruments the performance of the school and the competence of both the teaching and managerial nucleus. Thus, the changes made by the new management in the school context maintain the same line of thought as public policies that see everyone as equal, without considering existing differences, and minimizes the guarantee of fairer results.

The Centrality of Educational Assessment Policy in Brazil
The school, since its inception, was thought of as a way to mold the citizen to live in society, so that people who were not directed to manual or physical activities, had access to management and leadership activities. Thus, it is up to the school institution to determine each person in their place. Nowadays, this logic remains, as quality education remains restricted to a small portion of the population and remains as a way of framing students within a standard, whose main assessment model for university admission is the National Examination of the High School (NEHS).
In the current scenario of the New Public Management, educational policy dictates an economic logic in the pedagogical factor, determined by the modernization of the educational service that uses business management methods for results, transforming it as a solution to measure the quality of teaching. Thus, the relentless search for accounting results persists, and for this it uses evaluation mechanisms, for example, the NEHS and the Permanent Assessment System for Basic Education of Ceará (PASBEC). Such mechanisms aim to demonstrate the academic indices of students and the performance of the managerial and educational core in educational institutions. From this, the application of external evaluations serves to determine the evolution of the quality of teaching in the public network.
In Brazil, influenced by international assessment guidelines, the Basic Education Assessment System (BEAS) emerges, henceforth, several States create their own assessment systems, including Ceará is one of the first to create, in 1992, the Permanent Assessment System for Basic Education of Ceará (PASBEC). BEAS proposes the creation of a national assessment system that aims to establish priorities for improving teaching. Applied twice a year, always in odd years, the BEAS until its last edition in 2019, was subject to modifications that proposed to adapt the examination to what the international guidelines proposed. In its initial phase, the exam sought to assess by sampling only some grades of elementary school. In 2005, a new modification in the BEAS created two assessments: the National Assessment of Basic Education (Aneb), which kept the same characteristics of the exam, and the National Assessment of School Performance (Anresc), better known as Prova Brasil.
As Ferreira Filho et al. (2020, p. 6) emphasize, "this last change is significant, as the Prova Brasil marks the passage of the BEAS from the first to a second generation of external evaluation, characterized by the dissemination of results up to the level of schools, despite not having material consequences for them". With these changes, BEAS supports the creation, in 2007, of the Basic Education Development Index (BEDI), an indicator that brings together the results of two important concepts for the quality of education: school flow and performance averages in the evaluations. The BEDI is calculated from school approval data, acquired from the School Census, and from performance averages in the BEAS.
The Prova Brasil is classified as a diagnostic assessment, on a large scale, developed by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira. And it aims to assess the quality of education offered by the Brazilian educational system based on standardized tests and socioeconomic questionnaires. According to the Ministry of Education Portal, the tests are applied in the fourth and eighth grade, which currently corresponds to the fifth and ninth year of elementary school. Students answer the Portuguese language questions, with a focus on reading, and mathematics, the focus is on problem solving. In the socioeconomic questionnaire, students provide information about contextual factors that may be associated with performance. Teachers and directors of the evaluated classes and schools also respond to questionnaires that collect demographic data, professional profile and working conditions. The NEHS is the largest test in Brazil, administered annually to high school students. The NEHS test is held on two consecutive Sundays and is divided into four areas: Languages and Codes; Human Sciences; Natural Sciences; Math; as well as an essay, essay-argumentative text. The NEHS was created by the Ministry of Education in 1998, with the aim of evaluating the mastery of skills of students completing secondary education, at the end of basic education. As of 2004, the test began to be used as a tool for admission to private higher education institutions and, in 2010, with its inclusion in the Unified Selection System for admission to public universities, it was also recognized as the Brazil's largest and most complete educational exam, giving its participants the opportunity to enter public and private higher education institutions across the country. Today, NEHS is the main form of entry into higher education. It also assesses the performance and quality of education in the country, being a tool that helps to measure the performance of students, so that, if necessary, the implementation of public policies in the area of education is carried out.
When talking about the NEHS, it is necessary to highlight the government's disregard for the test in 2020. One must keep in mind the moment we are living during the Coronavirus Pandemic, and how it affected both the health and the educational field. With schools closed, many students had their access to studies barred, especially public school students, since private schools managed to maintain themselves through remote teaching. Emphasis should be placed on students in the third year of high school, the year in which many students apply to NEHS seeking to enter any university, whether federal or private, through the Unified Selection System; University for All Program with scholarships.
This time, the evaluation proved to be an unfair, elitist competition, revealing how exclusionary the race becomes, and shows how privileged a social class can be. Propagating this, the former Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, raised the publicity campaign for the exam in 2020.
As Almeida Júnior and Silva (2020) points out, this advertising piece shows another of the anti-democratic and exclusionary acts of the Jair Bolsonaro government, reveals how former minister Abraham Weintraub shows his intentions to carry out NEHS even though he knew that millions of students from public schools would leave hampered by the lack of quality educational support. With this campaign, the contribution of public school students, who often do not have access to physical equipment (computers, notebooks or tablets), have access to the internet through a limited data package, that quickly end, by cell phone.
It also disregards that many students do not have a calm and silent environment for studying, having to share space with family members. With this speech, the government satirizes the pain of many by saying "it is necessary to fight, reinvent, overcome", without considering the losses, whether financial or emotional, of the students. It reaffirms the thought that the student is on his own, that he finds the means to study and face the situation. The Government does not propose to create conditions to assist, guide and protect the right to quality education.

Thus, as Almeida Júnior and Silva (2020) brings, the test reveals the big problem that is
[...] the abyss between access to resources for a mediated education in which the middle class and the upper class have these educational inputs, and the lower classes do not have them. This historical relationship, once again, brings to light a process of exclusion and maintenance of Brazilian society based on an elitist agenda of perpetuation of social and economic powers in the country.
Through the Government of the State of Ceará, through the Secretariat of Education, the PASBEC has been implemented since 1992. The PASBEC, like the Prova Brasil, is configured as a large-scale external assessment that assesses competences and Skills of Elementary and High School students in Portuguese and Mathematics. The information collected at each assessment identifies the level of proficiency and the evolution of student performance. This assessment, carried out through a census, covers state and municipal schools, guided by Reference Matrices aligned with those of the BEAS. Since it has acquired great importance as an instrument of management effectiveness, as of 2007, Seduc expanded the scope of the PASBEC, incorporating the assessment of literacy and expanding the assessment of secondary education. Thus, PASBEC now has three focuses: I) Literacy Assessment -PASBEC -Alfa (2nd year); II) Elementary School Assessment (5th and 9th grades); III) High School Assessment (3 grades).

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education sector
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the world was experiencing a pandemic, caused by a virus that had emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and that quickly spread around the world causing millions of deaths. In just over a year of pandemic in the world, more than 2.89 million deaths have been registered, of these 341,000 in Brazil alone.
Present in the population's memory, through historical knowledge, are the remnants of other epidemics and pandemics worldwide, such as the Spanish flu that devastated the world at the beginning of the last century. The preventive measures of the time are remembered now, during the Coronavirus pandemic, as used decades ago, they are rescued for today.
Isolation and the recommended sanitary measures should be followed by the entire population, but there was concern mainly with the areas of greatest agglomeration and contagion: schools, factories/workshops, tenements, markets, public transport, mortuary cars, barracks, port, penitentiaries, offices public schools, boarding schools, hospices/asylums, commercial stores, pasture houses, guesthouses/hotels and convents. The established rules determined the isolation of the sick in homes or infirmaries for the indigent and newcomers to the city; disinfect streets, churches, cinemas, theaters, cafes, butchers, trams, trains and ships. (Couto et al., 2020, p. 6).
In the same way that occurred at the time of the Spanish flu, the information vehicles, leaflets and pamphlets, brought information, such as the measure of personal hygiene, it was advised to avoid spitting and spitting on the floor, and if necessary, to use handkerchiefs. Today, newspapers intensify the use of the mask and social isolation.
Today, the increase in cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 has led health authorities to adopt strict measures to combat the spread of the virus, including social isolation, causing the closing of businesses, industries, churches and schools. According to De Paula et al. (2020), between March 28 and April 26, 2020, 1.7 billion students (90% of all students in the world), of different levels and age groups in up to 193 countries were affected by the closing of the schools.
Throughout 2020, educational institutions began to live with the possibilities of localized closure and partial or total reopening, having a negative impact on the teaching-learning process and on the increase in school dropout. (Senhoras, 2020).
The internet has become an essential resource for teachers to transmit content to children, teenagers and adults in more remote places. Schools started to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a strategy to replace faceto-face meetings during the pandemic.
[...] ICTs have shown to be an important possibility to favor the teaching-learning process, as they are attractive resources that stimulate our senses, allow the sharing of information, point out new forms of relationship, communication, construction of knowledge and open up new pedagogical possibilities. (Souza, 2015, p. 350).
For Souza (2020), although ICTs are part of the routine of the school, teachers and students [...] their use during the pandemic period, to replace face-to-face meetings, has encountered several challenges, including: the infrastructure of teachers' and students' houses; the technologies used; students' access (or lack thereof) to the internet; training teachers to plan and carry out online activities. (Souza, 2020, p. 112).
According to data from (ICT Households 2019, 2020) in Brazil in 2019, 29% of all households did not have internet access, that is, 20 million Brazilians. The study also shows that 51% of homes in rural areas have internet, while homes in urban areas reach 75%. The report points out that, in the context of the pandemic, the low quality of the connection and the limited amount of available devices could make remote learning more precarious, reaching already vulnerable parts of the population, increasing even more inequalities (ICT Households 2019, 2020).
Despite the difficulties of accessing the internet, computers, smartphones and tablets for students in the public network, as well as the difficulty for teachers to master ICT. As stated in a survey conducted by De Paula et al. (2020), where 88% of teachers had never taught remotely and 83.4% do not feel prepared. Schools in Brazil could not close, and in the midst of a desolate scenario of uncontrolled and hitherto uncontrolled deaths and contaminations, where the only solution to combat the spread of the virus and deaths was social isolation. The solution was to adopt remote learning through the use of digital technologies.
It is legitimate to consider that remote teaching is characterized by the transport of physical classroom teaching to digital media, in a network. Where the content-centered process is taught by the same classroom teacher, synchronously following the same principles of classroom teaching. In this pandemic moment, teachers had to urgently adapt and dominate the new tools of Google Meet, Moodle platform, chats and lives. At the same time, they were undergoing a process of continuing education.
It is worth noting that remote teaching in the country is recognized by the National Council of Education and Minister of Education ordinance No. 343, amended by ordinance 345, and its workload is fully valid. For Souza (2020), the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the expected changes in education, where content teaching is increasingly out of place in our society. Therefore, it is necessary to join efforts to go beyond transmission-based teaching, the master's speakingdictating and experimenting with other methodologies and practices that take into account the potential of digital network technologies and favor collaboration, autonomy, creativity and authorship of teachers and students.
Educational assessment in recent decades, due to its complexity and controversies, has become a vast field of studies, debates and reflections, since the assessment according to Lordêlo and Dazzani (2009, p. 7), can be seen from different perspectives, " from the strictly didactic point of view and from the assessment strategies of school learning to epistemological, social and political issues that are involved in the educational institution and in other institutions that involve knowledge-power relations".
It is fair to point out that institutional evaluation deals with the institution's performance, public policies and the good performance of a project, and can also be used to evaluate the implementation of plans or projects, the results obtained or the impact caused. De Paula et al. (2020) classify institutional assessments into two types, those of educational or training models that are qualitative and democratic in character, with an emphasis on developing the quality of work produced by the assessed institution; and those of regulatory models, which are quantitative, technocratic and centralizing in nature that seek to guarantee the quality of the institution assessed by compliance with the operating rules pre-established by the systems.
As highlighted above, the results of state and national external assessments serve as indicators that provide an idea, a sense of the educational reality, and establish effective control over educational expansion and ensure the quality of education (Gonçalves et al., 2020). However, how to assess the quality of education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? With the COVID-19 pandemic, which took the entire world population by surprise, causing severe isolation, with the closing of schools and migration from on-site education to the Distance Education model. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in April 2020, issued a document providing an overview of the responses of many countries that chose to postpone their large-scale educational assessments. In the same document, UNESCO guides: Decisions on whether to keep, cancel, defer, go online or present alternative approaches to exams and learning validation remain with countries. Considerations for making such decisions revealed from this quick analysis are based, above all, on the safety, health and socio-emotional well-being of students and educational personnel. Onsite examinations must be maintained, adequate sanitary measures must be ensured (eg sanitization, masks and physical distance) in accordance with guidelines provided by national health authorities. (UNESCO, 2020, p. 13).
The same document mentions that Brazil had announced that the NEHS would not be postponed and would be carried out in digital and paper format, since until the scheduled date, November 2020, it believed that the COVID pandemic. 19 was already over. However, with the worsening of the pandemic, the Federal Senate presented a Bill of Law proposing to change the NEHS date, causing the Federal Government to postpone the date of the tests to January 2021 (Gonçalves et al., 2020).
In addition, Gonçalves et al. (2020) conducted a survey, where they assessed large-scale foreign policies in Brazil in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 26 states plus the Federal District, fourteen answered the questionnaire containing three questions regarding identification, consequences of the pandemic, readjustments of evaluation policies. By the date of the survey, July 2020, six had not decided to suspend or not take the tests (AP, AM, BA, CE, PE, GO); three states had decided to suspend or not take the tests in 2020 (PA, MA, SC); two would make adjustments to the test to be applied after returning from classroom classes (RN, MG); two already had tests in the system and only reduced the amount of application in 2020 (SE, PR); and one system did not mention what it was going to do (PI).
The aforementioned authors concluded that, due to the moment experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is understood that large-scale external evaluations would not generally be a priority, and that the priority at that time would be to observe the school context, create protocols and solve specific problems such as inequalities and losses.
To alleviate the impacts of social isolation on the teaching and learning process, as well as the challenges of working the results of external evaluations of the Educational Evaluation System of Pernambuco (Saepe), a state high school, in order to reduce the negative impacts on the post-pandemic results, it carried out individual assistance to students, meetings with the classes, liaison with families and preparation of a pedagogical plan based on the Saepe descriptors. In this way, it was possible to verify greater student participation in remote classes and improvement in learning.

Conclusion
The educational assessment policy gained the status of a central axis in public education policy in Brazil from the 1990s onwards as a result of the New Public Management irradiation in the Brazilian panorama. Indeed, the centrality of the assessment conditioned the logic of curriculum standardization that was expressed through policies such as the National Curriculum References, National Curriculum Parameters and, currently, the Common National Curriculum Base. These curriculum guidance indicators denote training based on skills and abilities that contribute to training that meets market demands.
Aspects linked to the New Public Management such as efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness permeate the rationality of educational policy and, consequently, of the evaluative logic. Indeed, the conditionalities of the era of privatizing education guidelines (De Paula et al., 2020) affect the modus operandi of school curricula, however, the evaluation and educational management mechanisms dismantle the democratic meanings of the school organization, since that the logic of business administration becomes the reference model for the educational system. Thus, it is considered that from the COVID-19 pandemic, the deepening of the evaluation logic that has as reference the performativity that is an integral part of the New Public Management radiates competition even more, however, in peripheral national states this tendency contributes for the deepening of educational inequalities as a result of access and permanence in the training process of the school. In this sense, the need to establish a National Education System would contribute to consolidating a democratic model of teaching, emancipatory assessment and that educational quality was the order of the day and even with the closing of teaching units due to the virus, still thus, there would be equality of education for students from the most popular and privileged socioeconomic strata. Therefore, we understand the need to deepen the discussions in the field of the national education system and in the discussion to develop forms of evaluation that have an emancipatory content.

Recommendations
Research in the field of educational management, as well as the evaluation of education, is relevant since global guidelines are set up that permeate national states, especially those with dependent capitalism. In this sense, it is suggested that for future research, the contributions of methodologies inherent to remote learning -ideal standard during the pandemic period -and the impacts on student learning in the capitalist periphery and the results obtained in international assessments managed by multilateral agencies are discussed.

Limitations
Educational management is a crucial field in the organization of global education, and, in this sense, assessment constitutes the logic of supervision that suggests that it should diagnose the problems inherent in the modus operandi of teaching units, however, it is understood that in Logic of the New Public Management Elements pertaining to business managerialism are incorporated in the educational routine, being deepened with the large-scale assessment policy as a way of exposing and intimidating educational institutions. Certainly, it is understood that there is a need to further explore the scores resulting from standardized tests and the underlying elements that constitute this rationality in global education.