Medindo a Qualidade das Escolas: Evidências para o Brasil

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the creation of an index that reflects the quality of school associated with school factors and avoids two problems found in previous studies: indicators of proficiency level that reflect more the family background of the student than school quality; and estimations of value added very sensitive to measurement errors. Thus, indicators are obtained through a structural model that models the latent variable quality of the school to correct the potential bias of previous studies. We used Brazilian data for applications of such indicators and we revisited the factors of family, school and management. The results show that the ranking of schools by quality indicators differs fromthe ordering obtained by the indicators with the proficiency level and is less volatile than the ordering obtained from the indicators of value added.