The decentralization of primary public schools in Brazil: an empirical analysis of the educational performance after the implementation of FUNDEF

Abstract

This study intends to provide a comprehensive analysis of the decentralization of basic public education in Brazil. It uses as reference the implementation of FUNDEF - Fund for Maintenance and Development of the Fundamental Education and Valorization of Teaching - to identify the impact of the decentralization on the students’ performance, as well as on the school’s efficiency. For this, a panel data from the school census between 1996 and 2006 is used. First, the impact of decentralization on students’ performance - failure, dropout and age-grade distortion rates - is estimated through the use of differencesin- differences models. An analysis on how the different local conditions might affect these results is also presented. After this, the efficiency of municipal and state schools is compared using a double bootstrap procedure that takes into account the effects of the local context on the estimated efficiency scores. Results indicate that there was an increase in failure rates and, more importantly, these results might be affected by local characteristics such as city size and political participation. Related to the efficiency estimations, results indicate that state schools are relatively more efficient and, local conditions would impact differently the efficiency of these two school types.