Ensaios sobre educação na rede pública de ensino fundamental: análises a partir dos Microdados da Prova Brasil

Abstract

This Master's Thesis consists of two essays that seek to answer two central questions. In the first essay the main goal is to verify the occurrence of contingency inequality in the sense described by Rawls (1971), among students from 5th and 9th grade from public schools of João Pessoa - PB. Thus, it attempts to explain why students with similar observable characteristics get such different results. To achieve this goal, it was used the Microdata from Prova Brasil 2011. The empirical strategy adopted was to combine the Propensity Score Matching with the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. This way, it was possible to obtain a more homogeneous sample in terms of observable factors of the students and separate them into two groups: those with performance above and below the average. Created these two groups, the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was used to decompose the average differential between observable and unobservable factors. The differential due to unobservable factors was attributed to the contingency effect, ie, the innate characteristics of each student. The results showed evidence favorable to the occurrence of such phenomenon. The second essay consists of an empirical exercise of impact evaluation. We sought to evaluate the effects of the Program Mais Educação, implemented in 2008, over five outcome variables: the Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (IDEB) of the schools, the average grade of schools in portuguese and mathematics, the dropout rate and an index of violence that was created. It was decided to evaluate this program for two main reasons: first because it has been increasingly adopted in Brazilian schools, and second because its costs are considerably high. For this purpose, it was used the Microdata from Prova Brasil 2007, 2009 and 2011. Thus, it was possible to construct a panel data structure containing information in a previous period (2007) and in two periods after the beginning of the program (2009 and 2011). The measurement of the impacts of Mais Educação was obtained through the combination of two methods widely used in this type of analysis, namely: Propensity Score Matching and Differences in Differences. The combination of these methods provides robust estimates of the effect of the program on the adopted outcome variables, because it allows the control of both the observable and unobservable characteristics. The estimated models indicate that the program in question is efficient especially in reducing dropout rates and violence in schools.