Racial inequalities in educational opportunities in Brazil

• In Event: Latin America SIG Highlighted Session: Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Race

Abstract

The Brazilian educational system faces a paradox. Although every 7-14 year old is in school, only two thirds of them will finish compulsory schooling Due to high levels of repetition and stop-outs, less than two thirds of the students who started school will finish 9th grade. Brazilian and Latin American researchers and policymakers blame fracasso escolar, a term that literally translates to school failure, for this situation. Fracasso escolar is considered a complex phenomenon encompassing and interrelating low achievement, grade repetition, temporary stop-out, and more permanent dropout. It represents a delay or disruption in the school lives of many Brazilian children. As in the case of many countries in Latin America, in Brazil educational opportunities are not equally distributed. Thus, fracasso escolar impacts unevenly children of different backgrounds. In terms of race, fracasso escolar is more prevalent among blacks and boys, than among white nd girls.
Using the 2001 and 2011 data from Brazilian National System for Evaluation of Basic Education (SAEB) administered by the Ministry of Education, this study analyses the change in the probability of school failure for different students in Brazil. A taxonomy of fitted logistic regression models describes the probability of school failure in 2001 and 2011, measured by repetition and stop-outs, as a function of the student’s race, gender, region and parental education. This technique allows for the results to be presented in terms of probability, which makes possible to calculate probability gaps among groups. The main findings are:
1) Being black increases the probability of school failure in all regions of the country and at all levels of parental education, despite the fact that the black white achievement gap has decreased over time in four of the five regions of the country.
In 2011, the difference in the probability of school failing for white and black ranges from 7 pp in the North to 19 pp in the South, while in 2001, this difference ranged from 5 pp to 23 pp, respectively.
2) For all racial groups being a boy increases the probability of school failure
Both in 2001 and in 2011, for all racial groups, boys are more likely to repeat and drop out of school than girls, in all regions of the country and for all levels of parental education. In 2011, boys are on average 12% more likely to fail than girls.
3) The difference between boys and girls increased overtime against boys. The gender gap among black students is the gap that increased the most.
Boys are more likely to repeat and drop out of school than girls in 2001 and 2011. However this gap has increased in the last ten years. Between 2001 and 2011 the difference in the probability of school failure among boys and girls increased in all regions and for all racial groups. This means that the improvement in access and quality of schooling in Brazil was not evenly distributed between boys and girls, since on average, girls have benefited the most.
This study of school failure among school students in Brazil shows that despite the country's effort to improve education, school failure is still a problem. Despite a slight improvement in the last decade, being black still decreases the likelihood of academic success. In 2011, 43% of black students in the 5th year have already failed or dropped out of school at least once. Moreover, even controlling for factors such as gender, parental education and geographic region, black students are far behind its white counterparts.
Gender is also an important predictor of school success. Black boys in the Northeast, whose parents have primary school continue to represent the most prone group to fail. In the last 10 years, their probability to fail in school decreased from 70% to 65% only.
Therefore, besides the fact that blacks belong to the most vulnerable group, there is a relationship between race and gender making black boys even more vulnerable.
This study aims to contribute to the debate on ethnicity and race in Latin America and Brazil. As the most unequal region of the world in terms of income distribution, research tended to focus on social class differences rather than race and/or ethnicity. In fact, state of the art research on race and education in Brazil and other Latin American countries has found that studies have constantly neglected race as a dimension of analysis, along with its effects in the distribution of educational opportunities among different groups.

Author

• Paula Louzano, Universidade de Sao Paulo