Eficiência da educação municipal e fatores contextuais: um estudo de escolas municipais da Paraíba

Abstract

After the educational reforms implemented in Brazil from the 1990s onward, the municipalization of primary education was effective in promoting the near-universalization of this level of schooling. However, the performance and efficiency metrics adopted to evaluate the public education sector have been widely questioned due to the persistence of educational inequalities. These criticisms highlight the need to consider contextual factors especially those related to students’ socioeconomic background when assessing outcomes, as this may be an important approach to capturing the complexity of the educational process and the specificities of local contexts. This qualitative-quantitative research aimed to analyze the methodologies and approaches used in empirical studies on the efficiency of public resource allocation in municipal education in Brazil, with an emphasis on the use of educational indicators and external variables beyond the control of school managers. The work is structured in the form of two scientific articles, each with its own objectives and research questions. The first chapter presents a systematic literature review, seeking to analyze empirical studies on the efficiency of municipal public spending on education in Brazil. The second chapter, presented as an empirical study, examined the efficiency of municipal schools in the state of Paraíba in achieving results on the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB). The systematic review revealed that nearly half of the analyzed studies did not consider contextual factors. The empirical study, based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), found that only 6.85% of schools were considered efficient according to the standard DEA model, and none of the 511 schools were considered efficient under the composite DEA model. The truncated regression model with bootstrap indicated that the age–grade distortion rate (TDI) was a statistically significant factor influencing the level of educational efficiency.