The Acess Funnel: the shape of inequality in brazilian school infrastructure

Abstract

This article reads the inequality of Brazilian school infrastructure not as a mere absence of resources, but as a shape. Drawing on the geography of Milton Santos, it takes infrastructure as the system of objects on which the action of educating depends, and examines how this system is distributed across the territory. It proposes the concept of the access funnel: the regular narrowing of access to the material conditions of schooling as the sustaining demands of resources increase. Using the 2025 School Census, infrastructure items are ordered by demand, according to their material, institutional, and personal dimensions, and this order is compared with the dispersion of their presence across regions. The two orderings converge strongly, and the convergence recurs, identical, in the early years of primary school and in secondary school, showing that the shape of the funnel is preserved throughout the school trajectory. The narrowing is more severe at the base, where regional inequality is sharpest. The article concludes that infrastructural inequality has a shape endowed with logic, one that accompanies the uneven geography of development without being reducible to it, and that, once sedimented, conditions what each school is able to offer.