Ensaios sobre educação básica cearense: eficiência e contrastes entre os meios rural e urbano

Abstract

Education has an indisputable importance for the economic development of a country and for the social ascension of individuals. Thus, it is necessary to use public resources allocated to education as efficiently as possible and assess whether the school infrastructure is capable of providing adequate teaching conditions. This dissertation is composed of two articles, the first measured the technical efficiency of rural and urban schools for the initial and final years of elementary education for municipalities in Ceará and the second sought to build an index that reflected the quality of school infrastructure in elementary education associated with school factors for rural and urban areas. Data from the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb) of 2019 and the National Education Development Fund (FNDE) were used through the Information System on Public Budgets in Education (SIOPE) to perform the data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the first chapter. The results showed that few municipalities managed to reach the frontier of maximum production possibilities and most of those that did have schools among the top one hundred in Brazil according to the Basic Education Development Index (Ideb). For the second chapter, data from the School Census of 2018 of Ministry of Education (MEC) was used to calculate the school infrastructure index, rank the municipalities in descending order and group them according to their similarities. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used as methods. The results showed that most municipalities in Ceará have a very low infrastructure index.