Test score gap between public and private schools for young Brazilian students

• Autor(a) principal: França, João Mário Santos de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Feijó, Janaína Rodrigues
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Econômicos (São Paulo)
• Texto Completo: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ee/article/view/171074
• topic: Desempenho educacional;; Disparidades; Escolas privadas e públicas; Educational performance; Educational disparities; Private and public schools

This paper studies the differences in performance between students from public and private schools, using data from the National High School Exam - ENEM-2017. To do so, we use decomposition techniques proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2018; 2011), which generalize the decomposition of Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) to other statistics (besides the average) of the distribution of a variable of interest. The results reveal that, looking at the decompositions of the average or median, the total difference of scores in the test is explained mostly by the students' endowments (Composition Effect). Within this effect, we note a primary relevance of the classroom socioeconomic background and the students' family socioeconomic background, which accounted for 42.12% and 19.35%, respectively, for the difference in performance between students from the two educational systems. On the other hand, when looking at the tails of the distribution, we observe also that the Structural Effect plays an important role in the lower quantiles (q10 and q25). In these quantiles, most of the disparities between public and private schools are explained by how students manage the socio-economic background of the classroom, as well as the characteristics of teachers and school, in order to convert these characteristics into higher scores.