Ensaios em economia da educação : evidências a partir da criação de escolas, da seleção de alunos e da multisseriação de turmas

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the effect of public policies adopted in Brazilian basic education on student performance. Especially, it focuses on differences and changes in class composition. For that, three essays are proposed. The first investigates how the increase in the choice of school, generated by the installation of units of the Federal Institutes of Education, affects the performance of other students who remain in the state public schools in secondary education. Based on a doubly robust empirical strategy (propensity score matching with differences in differences), it was possible to observe changes in the distribution of enrollments among schools. The loss of students from the state schools can be characteristic of a cream skimming process – transfer of peers with greater ability. This mechanism is useful to understand the negative results found, such as the reduction in the pass rate and grades in the National Secondary Education Examination (ENEM) and the increase in failure of students in the state schools. The second essay analyzes to what extent the way in which students are selected contributes to the results of schools. In the existence of two forms of selection of students among federal units, the identification strategy is based on assigning students into two groups: treatment (entrance by lot) and control (based on grades), with the estimation of the effect from matching methods. The hypothesis is that the form of selection is one of the determining factors of school performance in the last year of secondary school. The results found support this hypothesis, as they show that students who enter through a lottery have a lower performance than students selected based on grade criteria. The third essay seeks to verify how the organization of multigrade classes is related to the performance of students in elementary school (1st to 5th year – EF1). Through a fixed effects panel of schools, to control for possible endogeneities between the characteristics of the school environment and the propensity to multigrade, the results show that the use of multigrade classes contributes to the students' school flow. Although investments are needed to improve schools and to train teachers, there is evidence of a reduction in the failure rate, except for the fourth year of EF1. Together, the three essays reinforce the importance of peers (peer’s effects) in the performance achieved by students and for the advancement between years of education (school achievement).