Both Brazil's and the United States's educational policies are influenced by centralization of administration and formal objectives mandated by law. Arising from a long division in Brazilian life between government and people, public schools have been seen to be the concern of the government, which has preserved the antiquated division of secondary education into academic and vocational. Laws mandating reforms in public education have often done little to align public need with educational offerings, thus perpetuating the government's largely pro forma acknowledgment of educational needs. In the United States, too, educational policy has become increasingly centralized since World War II. The centralization, in the United States as in Brazil, has inevitably been accompanied by legal formalism, which divorces educational policy from actual local compliance. (JW)