Educational Inequality of Opportunities among Brazilian Children: The Role of Race, Parents Education and Regions

• Autores: R.M.O. Fontes, J.T.L. Coutinho, B. Bueno, G.C. Santos
• Localización: XVIII Encuentro de economía pública, 2011
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • This paper measures and compares the inequality of opportunities with respect to educational access among the children from different Brazilian states in the 2007 year using PNAD data. More specifically it quantifies the average probability of access of black and white children to education through a logit model; it calculates and compares the Dissimilarity Index and the Human Opportunity Index by Barros et al (2009a) for the Brazilian states and regions; it verifies if there is a relation between variables such as per capita income, race, parents education, regions and the children�s educational opportunities.

    It was detected a difference between the probability of Brazilian black and white children to be enrolled at the correct school classroom according to their ages, which was defined as the basic opportunity in this paper. Also it was noticed that the parents� education had a great influence on the children educational opportunity. Children with parents with less than four years of schooling had, in some states, half the probability of access to educational opportunities than children with educated parents and more than fifteen years of schooling. Another important variable explaining the children�s opportunity to education is race, followed by the family size.

    To measure whether there was inequality of opportunities in the Brazilian states, as the previous data had detected, the Dissimilarity and the Human Opportunity Indexes were calculated. The values estimated confirmed the children inequality opportunity in access to education in all Brazilian states. The state that is closer to the equality situation is São Paulo and the ones further away are Maranhão and Pará, according to these two mentioned indexes.

    Observing the Human Opportunity Index behavior in a map of all Brazilian regions, it is clear that the index is not homogeneous. The North and Northeast regions have lower values, suggesting a greater educational inequality. On the other hand, the South region had presented a higher index, suggesting more equality of educational opportunities.

    Finally, it seems to be a positive relation between the equality of educational opportunities and the average per capita income in most Brazilian states and regions.