Dois ensaios sobre eficácia e equidade na educação

Abstract

This study is aimedatunderstanding the relation betweeneducational effectiveness and inequality, with an educational production function framework. Two essays wereelaboratedaddressingdistinctly the existence of a possible trade-off between educationaleffectiveness and equity. The first essay aims to identify the determinants of the achievement and inequality of performance of municipal public schools based on the Mathematics test of the ProvaBrasil for the years 2007 and 2009.Individual characteristics of students, teachers and schools are taken into accountas well as variables related to the municipalities in order to identify the presence of a trade-off between educational efficiency and equity. The econometric approach is based on a hierarchical model into two levels (schools and municipalities), controlling for spatial dependence, so that regional determinants and spatial interaction among the municipalities in relation to the average performance of their schools are captured. The results reveal that there is no evidence of this trade-off. The incorporation of the variables at the municipal level also allowed toverify the importance of educational policy and socioeconomic characteristics of the municipalities in the explanation of the educational inequality. The second essay consisted in the estimation of a panel fixed effects, assuming the standard deviation of the average scores in the ProvaBrasil 2007 and 2009as the dependent variable, and assuming the same explanatory variables of the first essay,aggregated in municipal averages,. The central hypothesis tested was that there is aninvertedU-shaped relationship between educational equity and effectiveness, as described by the Educational Kuznets Curve, adapted to measure the parameters in terms of educational quality. The results indicated that, although not confirmed the hypothesis of Kuznets curve, it was found that there is no important trade-off between educational inequality and quality.