CHILD LITERACY AT THE RIGHT AGE AFTER MEETING THE 2025 TARGET: WHAT EXPLAINS THE JUMP FROM 59.2% TO 66% AND WHY THE 67% TARGET FOR 2026 REQUIRES A DIFFERENT STRATEGY

Abstract

In March 2026, the Anísio Teixeira National Institute for Educational Studies and Research announced that 66% of Brazilian public school children completed the 2nd year of elementary school literate in 2025, exceeding by two percentage points the 64% target of the National Commitment for Child Literacy and advancing seven points over the 59.2% of 2024, a year in which the target had been missed. This article investigates what explains this leap and argues that the 67% target set for 2026 requires a strategy different in nature from the one that produced the 2025 result. The qualitative, documentary investigation articulated official data from the Child Literacy Indicator, the normative acts of the Commitment, including Law No. 15,247, of October 31, 2025, which institutionalized it, and the available technical analyses with the literature on literacy policies, based on searches conducted in September 2026. The results decompose the leap into three vectors: the maturation of the Commitment's federative induction, with the adhesion of all states and municipalities; the recovery of states that had regressed in 2024, such as Bahia, Rondônia, Paraná and Amazonas; and a non-repeatable demographic component, since 2025 assessed the first cohort that attended preschool and the two initial years entirely without the effects of the pandemic. The analysis also shows that 20 federative units reached their targets, that Paraná and Goiás achieved the 80% projected nationally for 2030, and that Ceará, at the top of the series with 84%, recorded a slight decline, a sign of diminishing returns. It is concluded that progress to 67% and beyond will depend less on recovering ground lost in the pandemic and more on reaching the third of children still not literate, on restoring the learning of cohorts that have passed the 2nd year, and on gradually raising the level of demand of the indicator itself.