Determinantes do desempenho dos alunos do Ensino Fundamental das escolas públicas brasileiras: uma abordagem multinível

Abstract

Considering the international and national literature, there are robust evidences that schooling is a key variable in determining the economic progress of individuals and nations. Education has increasingly become one of the cornerstones of strategies for promoting social prosperity. As a result, there has been a growing incidence about the quality of teaching in discussions and in educational public policies worldwide. In Brazil, discussions about quality in the educational area raise questions about faculty formation, investments, school physical structure, student socioeconomic profile and school management. These variables would thus be constitutive elements that determine the quality of a school unit. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyse the importance of these variables in the quality of elementary education in Brazil, showing which are the main inputs that are determinant for the learning of public-school students. SAEB and School Census microdata are used to analyse the influence of student characteristics and family background (level 1) and school infrastructure (level 2) on the performance of Portuguese language and math proficiency exams applied to students of the 5th and 9th years of the Brazilian public schools in the period 2007/2015. The results of multilevel estimations indicate that higher levels of learning are associated with providing adequate school infrastructure. More importantly, the analysis indicates that the school context accounts for approximately 18% of student performance variability, so providing a suitable school environment becomes strategic for student development and, consequently, an important public policy object.