Public investment in basic education and economic growth

The main objective of this paper was to visualize the relation between government spending on basic education and the human capital accumulation process, observing the impacts of this spending on individual investments in higher education, and on economic growth. It is used an overlapping-generations model where the government tax the adult generation and spent it in basic education of the next generations. It was demonstrated that the magnitude of the marginal effect of government spending in basic education on growth crucially depends on public budget constrains. The paper explains why some countries with a lot of public investment in basic education growth at low rates. In that sense if a country has only a lot of public investment in basic education without investment in higher education it may growth at low rates because the taxation can cause distortions in the agents incentives to invest in higher education.

Equity and Efficiency in Education: motivations and targets

The recently released "Educational PAC" attempts to place basic education at the center of the social debate. We have subsidized this debate, offering a diagnosis of how different education levels can impact individuals' lives through broad and easily interpreted indicators. Initially, we analyze how much each educational level reaches the poorest population. For example, how are those in the bottom strata of income distribution benefited by childcare centers, private secondary education, public university or adult education. The next step is to quantify the return of educational actions, such as their effects on employability and an individual's wages, and even health as perceived by the individual, be that individual poor, middle class or elite. The next part of the research presents evidence of how the main characters in education, aka mothers, fathers and children, regard education. The site available with the research presents a broad, user-friendly database, which will allow interested parties to answer their own questions relative to why people do not attend school, the time spent in the educational system and returns to education, which can all be cross-sectioned with a wide array of socio-demographic attributes (gender, income, etc.) and school characteristics (is it public, are school meals offered, etc.) to find answers to: why do young adults of a certain age not attend school? Why do they miss classes? How long is the school day? Aside from the whys and hows of teaching, the research calculates the amount of time spent in school, resulting from a combination between absence rates, evasion raters and length of the school day. The study presents ranks of indicators referring to objective and subjective aspects of education, such as the discussion of the advantages and care in establishing performance based incentives that aim at guiding the states in the race for better educational indicators.

The brazilian education quality index (Ideb): measurement and incentives upgrades

The increasing availability of social statistics in Latin America opens new possibilities in terms of accountability and incentive mechanisms for policy makers. This paper addresses these issues within the institutional context of the Brazilian educational system. We build a theoretical model based on the theory of incentives to analyze the role of the recently launched Basic Education Development Index (Ideb) in the provision of incentives at the sub-national level. The first result is to demonstrate that an education target system has the potential to improve the allocation of resources to education through conditional transfers to municipalities and schools. Second, we analyze the local government’s decision about how to allocate its education budget when seeking to accomplish the different objectives contemplated by the index, which involves the interaction between its two components, average proficiency and the passing rate. We discuss as well policy issues concerning the implementation of the synthetic education index in the light of this model arguing that there is room for improving the Ideb’s methodology itself. In addition, we analyze the desirable properties of an ideal education index and we argue in favor of an ex-post relative learning evaluation system for different municipalities (schools) based on the value added across different grades

Accountability and yardstick competition in the public provision of education

This paper explores the institutional change introduced by the public disclosure of an education development index (IDEB, Basic Education Development Index) in 2007 to identify the e ect of education accountability on yardstick competition in education spending for Brazilian municipalities. Our results are threefold. First, political incentives are pervasive in setting the education expenditures. The spatial strategic behavior on education spending is estimated lower for lame-ducks and for those incumbents with majority support at the city council. This suggests a strong relation between commitment and accountability which reinforces yardstick competition theory. Second, we nd a minor reduction (20%) in spatial interaction for public education spending after IDEB's disclosure | compared to the spatial correlation before the disclosure of the index. This suggests that public release of information may decrease the importance of the neighbors` counterpart information on voter`s decision. Third, exploring the discontinuity of IDEB`s disclosure rule around the cut-o of 30 students enrolled in the grade under assessment, our estimates suggest that the spatial autocorrelation | and hence yardstick competition | is reduced in 54%. Finally, an unforeseen result suggests that the disclosure of IDEB increases expenditures, more than 100% according to our estimates.

The impact of mayor leadership on education: evidence from Brazil

What are the impacts of female mayors on education? It is well known that in Brazil, like in many other countries around the globe, women are underrepresented in political posts. Understanding the impacts of this discrepancy on policy choice and redistribution across many areas of inquiry is, therefore, an important research endeavor. Extant literature shows a strong link between women and the economic development of the areas they govern, specifically that they provide public goods relevant to the needs of women constituents. However, despite the efforts to explore the impacts of gender political leaders, we still do not know what is the consequence of gender on policy outcomes. Exploring a rich dataset on Brazilian municipalities, I intend to enrich the literature on the role of female politicians on politics. I employ a regression discontinuity design using Brazilian elections and indicators on education based on the basic education development index (IDEB), education expenditures and local policies. I find that municipalities where a woman enters into power do not perform better on education and do not present more investments or policies to improve education.

Museu Antônio Parreiras: uma casa para um pintor, uma experiência do olhar

Este trabalho visa mostrar a importância do estreitamento dos laços entre as instituições educacionais e os museus nacionais. Essa relação é fundamental para abertura de horizontes culturais dos alunos enquanto criança ou adolescente, influenciando diretamente na sua formação escolar e em seus valores de patrimônio artístico. Essa importância pôde ser comprovada na pesquisa aplicada aos estudantes do ensino fundamental do IEPIC - Instituto de Educação Professor Ismael Coutinho, em Niterói – RJ, em parceria com o Museu Antônio Parreiras. Apesar do museu ser localizado ao lado da escola, muitos alunos nunca o haviam visitado e nem sabiam da sua existência. As escolas devem contribuir com a criação de projetos que incluam visitas a museus e contatos diretos com obras de arte. Assim como os educadores devem estimular a valorização do patrimônio artístico local, chamando atenção para o conhecimento e preservação do mesmo. Essas experiências representam um assimilar de atitudes que se refletirão positivamente na vida adulta do aluno. Uma relação sólida entre escola e museu permitirá ao aluno uma aprendizagem baseada no diálogo com a obra de arte que incentivará o ato criativo e a procura pela originalidade, bem como o capacitará como agente multiplicador desse saber a colegas de aula, amigos, familiares e à comunidade a que pertence.

Variações sobre o tema implementação: a terminalidade antecipada em Cordeiro

Constata-se, com freqüência, que planos e projetos bem elaborados, com recursos suficiente e adequados, não conseguem ser implementados com sucesso, ainda que tenha havido uma previa e cuidadosa identificação dos elementos que poderiam ter influência no processo de implementação. Isto decorre do fato de que qualquer implementação seria ê afetada por inumeros eventos imprevisíveis, o que" a torna uma tarefa imensamente difícil, mesmo sob as melhores condições. Nesta dissertação, um estudo de caso, abordamos a implementação da Política de Terminalidade Antecipada no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Há alguns anos atrás, o Rio de Janeiro lançou-se ã implementação da Política de Terminalidade Antecipada buscando adequar currículos, metodos e duração da educação básica ã sociedade agrícola do interior do Estado. Tal Política foi iniciada em condições aparentemente as mais auspiciosas e parecia não envolver nenhum elemento dramático. Prudentemente, decidiu-se concentrar a implementação, num primeiro momento, em Cordeiro e municípios vizinhos. Com base no experimento, a Política seria extendida a outras áreas do Estado. Previa-se, no decorrer da implementação, uma ação integrada das Secretarias de Estado de Agricultura, de Educaçao e Cultura, e de Saude. O processo de implementação desenvolveu-se durante dois Governos Estaduais sucessivos e está entrando em um terceiro.

Three essays on local demand for public services

Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1-hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities.

Estudo de viabilidade de parceria público-privada em Educação Básica

O trabalho avalia a viabilidade de utilizar-se da rede privada de escolas para oferecer educação básica aos alunos da rede pública, através do preenchimento da ociosidade existente nos colégios privados.

A formação para as relações etnicorraciais e a profissionalização em história: saberes e práticas docentes no contexto da educação a distância

Esta pesquisa analisa a experiência de formação em história, na modalidade a distância, de professores-leigos da educação básica dos estados do Ceará, Bahia, Maranhão e Sergipe, contemplados pelo Programa Pró-Licenciatura II, financiado pelo Ministério da Educação, graças ao consórcio firmado entre a Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro e a Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, entre os anos de 2006 e 2010. O objeto do estudo foi a aplicabilidade da Lei nº 11.645/08, antes Lei nº 10.639/03, que alterou a Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional nº 9.394/96, ao instituir a obrigatoriedade do estudo da história e cultura afro-brasileira e indígena em todos os estabelecimentos de ensino fundamental e de ensino médio, públicos e privados do país. Há uma produção significativa de estudos que relacionam educação e relações etnicorraciais, porém são escassos os trabalhos voltados para a formação inicial e/ou continuada de professores. Quais disciplinas são oferecidas? Como o tema aparece no currículo? Como os licenciandos e professores lidam com a obrigatoriedade da Lei? Como ocorrem a produção e a mobilização dos saberes, assim como as práticas sobre esse tema? E qual o nível de comprometimento com o mesmo foram algumas das questões que nortearam a pesquisa. A resposta para essas questões foram orientadas pelas contribuições de Maurice Tardif sobre os saberes docentes, amparadas em metodologia de estudo de caso que utilizou entrevistas semiestruturadas, questionários, análises das aulas-texto produzidas pelos formadores, do ambiente online da disciplina e dos documentos formais que organizaram o curso e instituíram a citada Lei. A investigação revelou um esforço dos docentes formadores e dos professores-cursistas em se munir de saberes e práticas concernentes aos temas da Lei, por outro lado, alguns fatores impuseram limites à profissionalização, como a modalidade a distância, o desconhecimento sobre o tema e a disponibilidade de tempo dos professores-cursistas.

A reinvenção da ação profissional no programa interdisciplinar de apoio às escolas municipais do Rio de Janeiro: um estudo de caso de duas equipes

Este estudo pretende analisar e documentar a atuação profissional de assistentes sociais, professores e psicólogos no Programa Interdisciplinar de Apoio às Escolas Municipais do Rio de Janeiro, através do estudo de caso de duas equipes interdisciplinares em duas unidades escolares. Neste percurso foi possível observar a correlação entre a escolha da unidade escolar para atuação e o Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica.

Educação fiscal: a experiência do Grupo de Educação Fiscal Estadual de Pernambuco

O trabalho de conclusão de curso de mestrado acadêmico apresenta um estudo de caso sobre educação fiscal, cuja unidade de análise é o Grupo de Educação Fiscal de Pernambuco. A dissertação tem como objetivo final identificar as principais dificuldades que devem levar em conta os gestores, nos processos de execução da educação fiscal nas escolas públicas do ensino fundamental pernambucano. Para tanto, realiza uma combinação de quatro técnicas de coletas de dados, empregando formulário de pesquisa com perguntas fechadas e abertas, observações livres, entrevistas individuais e grupo de foco. Emprega técnicas de análise temática e categorial considerando as perspectivas micro e macrossociais. A base da interpretação abrange perspectivas históricas, culturais, políticas e econômicas. O estudo apresenta discussões sobre sociedade, poder e educação moral num contexto de psicologia social dos valores humanos. Apresenta seis variáveis de influência negativa do fenômeno e possíveis soluções, apontando a falta de um banco de dados próprio, metas e avaliações de desempenho comuns aos membros do grupo. Reprova a denominação “disseminador” e sugere a capacitação de professores para organizar os papéis que os meninos e meninas devem assumir em sala de aula. Conclui ser necessária a pressão a congressistas, visando à aprovação de lei que determine a inclusão de uma disciplina obrigatória de Ética enquanto Ciência da Moral na educação básica nacional. Sugere a vinculação de verbas a contraprestações com uma Coordenação centralizada do PNEF. Conclui que o Brasil necessita fixar uma matriz moral em seus jovens visando à construção de uma cultura de respeito ao próximo e tolerância às diferenças e que a melhor forma de realizar isso é por meio de investimentos em educação moral.

Percepção de qualidade das escolas do ponto de vista de alunos do ensino médio

This study aims at evaluating the perception towards the quality of services offered by private high schools in Brazil. For this purpose, field research was conducted at four different schools: two in Rio de Janeiro, one in Belo Horizonte and one in the countryside of Minas Gerais. Such research was conducted by using an instrument known a SERVQUAL, a framework developed for assessing service quality. Target audience were 1st and 2nd year high school students and the research was carried out at the schools. 44 items were evaluated, 22 being related to students’ expectations towards the services which should be offered by the school. The other 22 items evaluated students’ perception towards the actual service offered by the school. By analyzing the results it was possible to measure the difference between the service the students expected from the schools and the one actually offered by the schools. Results show great opportunities for improvement in the services and also contribute to a better and wider understanding concerning basic education service quality.

Capitalismo de estado e inovação: facetas da relação entre estado e iniciativa privada no desenvolvimento nacional

While countries managed to rapidly rise and recover economically, Brazilian social indicators have advanced at short pace in the last decades. Although millions of Brazilians have recently left poverty, Brazil still has a long way to go regarding its socioeconomic development. Circa one fifth of the population is still considered functionally illiterate, basic education has one of the poorest performances in the world, the country has no top-level universities nor produces technology or patents at relevant levels. This paper, at first, analyses how the interaction between government and private agents influenced Brazil’s industrial and economic development, identifying the existence of bonds based on the exchange of private interests that at great extension kept public policies from reaching goals of national interest – the so called crony capitalism. Secondly, the paper verifies how development policies based on the promotion of innovative companies and segments of the industry may positively impact broad socioeconomic development. The paper delves specifically into the cooperation between universities and industry as a development tool. Enterprises and universities, guided by their endogenous interests, may be combined for the structuring of a national innovation system. While universities are fundamentally interested in promoting knowledge accumulation, enterprises are willing to invest financial capital in universities in exchange for the economic exploitation of products developed within the academic environment and direct access to its human capital. Lastly, the paper identifies the legal and cultural barriers and advances of this mechanism in Brazil. It verifies that, notwithstanding the institutional advance promoted by the Law of Innovation to the university-enterprise cooperation in Brazil, the law wasn’t entirely capable of eliminating the legal uncertainty of this relationship and capturing in an efficient way the interests of the agents involved. Recently, federal law n. 12.863/2013 officially offered universities the option of bypassing problems related to public law by regulating support foundations, which conceives greater certainty and simplicity to the cooperation. There are, however, remaining uncertainties regarding the norms to be edited by the executive power, as well as conflicts of interest linked to the property rights over patents resulting from this kind of cooperation. The paper verifies, moreover, the existence of ideological resistance to this tool within universities, in such a way that it is unlikely that those relationships develop in a systematic way throughout the country without further engagement from the government and its executive and legislative bodies.

Uma avaliação analítica dos resultados da Prova Brasil

Em Uma avaliação analítica dos resultados da Prova Brasil, investigamos o reflexo dos resultados da Prova Brasil na tomada de decisões de gestores da educação na busca pela melhoria do desempenho dos alunos das escolas da rede pública. Voltamos nossa atenção para o sistema nacional de avaliação da educação básica visando verificar aspectos positivos e negativos e como o diagnóstico da qualidade do ensino ministrado e da aprendizagem pode influenciar a garantia do padrão de qualidade na educação. Palavras-chave