| Hello, *|NOME|* Brazil has an extensive educational monitoring system managed by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), which monitors student learning through the Basic Education Evaluation System (SAEB). The results of the 2023 edition of this evaluation were recently published. The results for Portuguese Language show that 45 out of every 100 students in the 5th year of public elementary school are not adequately literate. These students obtained scores below 200 points on a scale that goes up to 400, classified as "insufficient" or "inadequate" proficiency levels. In practice, this means that they cannot identify cause-and-consequence relationships in texts, do not differentiate fact from opinion, and have difficulties even recognizing the central theme or explicit information in short texts. In terms of magnitude, there are 992 thousand Brazilian children and pre-adolescents in this condition. Notably, this deficiency in basic literacy directly affects learning in other areas of the school curriculum, such as Mathematics and Science, subjects that require reading skills for understanding and assimilating fundamental concepts. Given this result, what to expect for the school and even professional trajectory of these almost one million Brazilian children who at this school stage have not yet reached basic reading skills in Portuguese? It is worth remembering that most of these students belong to families in a more disadvantaged socioeconomic situation. And, in this regard, since education is a strong lever for social mobility, our system seems to contribute to perpetuating cycles of poverty and social exclusion. However, we have already had more satisfactory results in the Portuguese Language exam of the SAEB for the 5th year of elementary school. In 2017, we reached 60.7% of students classified as having an "adequate" level of learning, the result of an improvement that had been occurring for ten years, year after year, since 2007, when only 25.5% of students had reached the "adequate" level. But, from 2017-2019 Brazil seems to have reversed this cycle of gains, with 56.5% at an "adequate" level of learning. The data for 2023, with 55.1% of students at an "adequate" level, show that we have not yet recomposed the 2017 result or the pre-pandemic numbers. Without any hesitation, we can state that the pandemic bore negative effects, and that these were only partially recovered in 2023. This recovery was not strong enough to return to 2019 levels (56.5%) and much less, to the 2017 level (60.7%). In summary, it cannot be said that the result of 2023, a level below 2019, occurred exclusively due to the pandemic. These results also suggest another question: if Brazil had been advancing in education results until 2017, what caused the reversal of this trajectory from that year on? There are still no satisfactory answers to this question. One aspect to be considered is that these results are not homogeneous throughout the Brazilian territory and that it would be of great value to learn from the evidence and success stories, analyzing, for example, the heterogeneities between municipalities. This, however, is no longer possible, as INEP has no longer made data available at the municipal level since 2021, which hinders and/or impedes this objective. It is regrettable that in the face of such results, due to a very questionable decision by INEP, we are navigating in the dark. See you in the next "IMDS Letter"! Paulo Tafner CEO | 
