Three essays on education from the perspective of the economics of public setor

This work consists of three essays organized into chapters that seek to answer questions at first sight unrelated, but with one common denominator, which is the scarcity of public resources devoted to education, overall, especially in lower education. . The first chapter deals with the scarcity of resources devoted to education in a context of population aging. Two hypotheses were tested for Brazilian municipalities on the relationship between the aging of the population and educational expenditure. The first, already proven in the literature, is that there is an intergenerational conflict for resources and the increase of the share of elderly in the population reduces the educational expenditure. The second, proposed here for the first time, is that there should be reduction of competition for resources if there is a relationship of co-residence between young and old. The results indicated that an increase in the share of elderly reduces the educational expenditure per youth. But the results also illustrate that an increase in the share of elderly co-residing with youth (family arrangement more common in Latin American countries) raises the educational expenditure, which reflects a reduction of competition for resources between generations. The second chapter assesses the allocative efficiency of investments in Higher Education. Using the difference between first-year and last-year students’ scores from Enade aggregated by HEI as a product in the Stochastic Production Function, is possible to contribute with a new element in the literature aimed at estimating the production function of education. The results show that characteristics of institutions are the variables that best explain the performance of students, and that public institutions are more inefficient than the private ones. Finally, the third chapter presents evidence that the allocation of public resources in early childhood education is important for a better future school performance. In this chapter was calculated the effects of early childhood education on literacy scores of children attending the 2nd grade of elementary school. The results using OLS and propensity score matching show that students who started school at the ages to 5, 4, and 3 years had literacy scores between 12.22 and 19.54 points higher than the scores of those who began school at the ages 6 years or late. The results also suggest that the returns in terms of literacy scores diminish in relation to the number of years of early childhood education.

Os mecanismos de transmissão cultural na escola primária: um estudo de caso

O presente trabalho teve por objetivos: i) examinar por meio de que mecanismos se dá a inculcação da cultura secundária na escola primária; ii) verificar os efeitos desta inculcação nas representações da clientela que frequenta a escola; iii) verificar até que ponto a escola está cumprindo sua função de reprodução das classes culturais dominates da sociedade. Neste estudo, consideramos o processo educacional como a inculcação, nos alunos, dos valores da classe dominante da sociedade por meio do exercício da Violência Simbólica, que caracteriza a ação pedagógica, e a escola como o ambiente formal e institucional onde se processam, de modo legítimo, as relações de dominação e de inculcação dos padrões culturais desses grupos ou classes, por intemédio das professoras, agentes também legítimos desse processo de inculcação do arbitrário cultural. Todo o estudo foi caracterizado por um enfoque antropológico, guiado pela observação participativa junto ao grupo e área selecionados para estudo. Verificou-se que a escola, através de suas práticas, inculca nos alunos aspirações que são típicas da classe dominante da sociedade. Estas aspirações foram manifestadas em suas representações. Observou-se, ainda, que a escola, por intermédio de seus agentes, atribui o fracasso escolar dos alunos unicamente a seu ambiente cultural (primeira socialização), que não reforça os conteúdos que a escola ensina. Além disso, observou-se que, após muitos anos de magistério, a tendência das professoras é também se aculturarem ao meio onde trabalham, gerando no processo de ensino a possibilidade da ocorrência daquilo que chamamos de transgressão do código de violência simbólica. Como este trabalho trata-se de um estudo de caso, seria conveniente que o mesmo tema fosse pesquisado em outras configurações, principalmente se se tiver como objetivo testar o grau de generalidade das características constatadas a partir deste estudo particular.

The impact of daycare attendance on math test scores for a cohort of 4th graders in Brazil

We estimate the impact of having attended center-based daycare institutions during early childhood on Math test scores at the 4th grade of elementary school. Because enrollment in daycare centers may depend on unobservable character-istics of the family and the child, we build and estimate a structural model of endogeneous choice of school to deal with the selectivity problem. We nd that attendance to daycare institutions is associated with a gain of approximately 0,04 standard deviation in Math test scores. This result is important to the extent our OLS results as well as most of the studies for Brazil nd no e¤ect associated to daycare attendance, suggesting selectivity may play a role on this finding.

A relação entre proficiência e dispersão de idade na sala de aula: a influência do nível de qualificação do professor

In this article we show that among elementary school students in Brazil there is a negative and significant relationship between within-class age dispersion and pupil’s proficiency. The relationship between the age-grade delay and school proficiency is usually explained by several factors that influence the educational process, since both student’s age-grade and his/her proficiency reflect difficulties implicit in the child's life. However, we show that the negative relation between within-class age dispersion and individual proficiency can be mitigated by the presence of teachers with high levels of certain attributes, such as teaching experience and years of schooling. This relationship supports the hypothesis that the greater the within-class age dispersion, the difficulties of implementing uniform learning projects are more significant, considering that there is a greater diversity of interests. Therefore, under those circumstances the role of the teacher in class seems to be essential to minimize any negative effect that age diversity may have on individual performance.