Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Efforts to Improve Basic Education Before, During, and After the Pandemic

This chapter details FGV’s contributions to basic education during the pandemic. FGV created in 2003 an accessible tool that addresses the managerial gaps that schools and education departments face to evaluate and assess its students, called FGV High School. Since March 2020, when school closures took place, the rapid demand for digital education tools placed FGV High School in an advantageous position to establish partnerships with education departments across Brazil, benefiting millions of high school students. In the state of Sao Paulo alone, the FGV High School platform gives access to approximately 3.5 million students. In 2008, FGV became a member of Open Education Global (OEG), a consortium of educational institutions from different countries that provide online content and teaching materials free of charge. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for FGV’s online courses has substantially increased. In March 2020 alone, the program’s website registered more than 1.6 million hits, and the number has since then consistently increased. Additionally, FGV has recently created two policy centers that focus on basic education: The Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policy (CEIPE), created in 2016, and the Center for the Development of Public Management and Educational Policy (DGPE), in 2018. Since the beginning of the pandemic, both centers have organized a series of webinars and publications to support policymakers in the education sector to make better decisions regarding reopening of schools, online and digital education options, curriculum, etc. The high number of views and engagement that the FGV webinars attract reflects the desire for reliable information that education professionals have been seeking, despite the overwhelming number of online events that have surfaced with the pandemic.