A influência da qualidade do professor sobre a proficiência dos alunos: uma análise longitudinal

Abstract

An important issue that has received attention in studies of the economics of education literature refers to identifying relevant inputs to children’s educational performance and the possibility of implementing public policies that are effective. In particular, the results of educational performance coming from teacher quality are not consensual. One issue that still needs to be investigated is whether a good quality teacher positively affects the academic performance of students over time. In this sense, the aim of this study is to identify the impact of teachers’ contributions to learning through the proficiency of students in public and private schools in selected municipalities in Brazil. From the longitudinal micro project GERES – Geração Escolar, which accompanied the students' performance in the first stage of elementary school in the years 2005 to 2008, we used the educational production function (EPF) including fixed effects for students, teachers and the match between them to detect the effect of the observed teacher’s quality and seek to avoid the bias caused by the omission of variables on the students’ outcomes. The relevance of longitudinal data allows to evaluate the evolution of children's learning and use less restrictive assumptions on the estimation results. This type of specification, as far as we investigated, was not used in the empirical literature of the teacher’s effect in student proficiency. From the results it was found that controlling for fixed effects, including the match, issues such as the teacher has other work has a negative impact on the proficiency of their students. Variables such as education, experience and income are significant for reading and the results are consistent. For math, these same variables are not significant, indicating that the unobserved characteristics when controlled are able to explain the differences in the notes. Using the coefficients of the dummies of the teachers, students that changes from worst to best teacher in portuguese can achieve the third level of learning according to the scale of GERES. A student who changes from worst to best math teacher can leave the first level of learning and achieve the fifth level in accordance with the scale for this proficiency.