The Role of School Quality on Schooling in Brazil

Leticia Marteleto, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and CEDEPLAR
Clarissa G. Rodrigues, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and CEDEPLAR

Despite recent improvements in educational levels, Brazil shows persisting high levels of schooling inequality and dissimilarity between appropriate age and grade. One key component that has been left out on most studies on education in developing countries has been the systematic disentanglement of all barriers to education faced by children and adolescents: individual, school, and place of residence levels. The goal of this paper is to investigate the impact of school quality on years of schooling and age-grade correspondence in Brazil. Based on nationally representative individual-level data merged with school censuses from 1997 and 2001, we estimate ordinary linear and logistic models of schooling and probability of age-grade correspondence for several age groups. We next estimate hierarchical linear models to account for variation at both the individual and school urban/rural state levels.