The impact of structured teaching methods on the quality of education

This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education of the students in primary public school in Brazil. Structure methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied to the education system. In recent years, several municipalities in the State of São Paulo have contracted out private educational providers to implement these structured methods in their schooling system. Their pedagogical proposal involves structuring curriculum contents, elaboration and use of teachers and students textbooks, and training and supervision of the teachers and instructors. Using a difference in differences estimation strategy, we find that the fourth and eighth grader students in the municipalities with structured methods performed better in Portuguese and Math than students in municipalities not exposed to the methods. We find no differences in approval rates. However, a robustness check is not able to discard the possibility that unobserved municipal characteristics may affect the results.

Achieving quality in management of development ngos: analysis of four ngos in Rio de Janeiro.

Rio de Janeiro is among the cities with the highest amount of NGOs in the world. However, not all of the projects carried out by the NGOs are equally successful. In this research, I would like to analyze a selection of some of the most well-known social development enterprises operating in Rio, in order to better understand how they operate, what difficulties they face, which factors play the crucial role in achieving peak performance. Moreover, I would like to compare the field research findings with the academic theory on management of social development NGOs, and possibly come up with ideas for further improvements.