Educational trajectories as evidence of the quality of Brazilian basic education

Abstract

According to the Federal Brazilian Constitution, the right to education means that all children had access to a school, and remained there for the legally determined time and, acquired the knowledge and skills necessary for full adult life. This paper focuses on the analysis of students’ permanence in school, an essential condition for learning represented here by their educational trajectories. The School Census longitudinal data, from 2007 to 2015 were used to analyze the student’s educational trajectories classified into three types: regular; with few irregularities; and with many irregularities. The results show that some social groups are much more prone to having a regular trajectory, and others to having grade repetition or being out of school after few years. A large proportion of black boys have trajectories with many irregularities. In addition, this paper shows that the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB, acronym in Portuguese) – the official index for measuring the quality of education in the municipalities – can reach a high value even if many students have irregular trajectories. This evidenced the selectivity effect embedded in this indicator. This paper suggests the incorporation of educational trajectories into the indicator to monitor the quality of education in Brazilian municipalities.

Key words
Right to education; Quality of education; Educational trajectories; Longitudinal data; Basic education; School census