The distance between public and private school in Brazil is considerable, having the private school the advantage. Nevertheless we perceive crisis signals also in the private school, whose performance has been falling in the last years, especially in 2005. What most calls our attention is that this decadence is greater in more developed regions and in mathematics. We suggest that the main reason would be instruccionism in both systems, since they share the same educational politics and the same teachers. The greater difference is possibly that private school is managed by private initiative with market and parents pressure: it follows that its performance, although not acceptable, is higher. We also suggest that the most promising initiative to overcome this predicament would be to bet on teacher, caring systematically of his permanent formation, within the premise that, if the teacher learns well, the student could do it as well.
Public school; Private school; Instruccionism; Learning; Teacher
