Efeito da política de educação do campo sobre indicadores educacionais no Ceará

Abstract

In the 1990s, Brazilian rural education underwent important changes in the curricular structure of teaching, driven by the absence of a pedagogical model that addressed educational content and practices linked to rural realities. Over the years, several educational policies were developed with the purpose of reformulating the teaching provided in rural schools and promoting an inclusive education capable of incorporating knowledge, activities, and learning experiences associated with rural life. As a result, the state of Ceará developed a Rural Education policy, aiming to formulate a pedagogical proposal connected to the culture and identity of rural inhabitants. This public policy seeks to adapt teaching and learning to rural realities through contextualized pedagogical practices, teacher training, and curricular adaptation. In this context, this dissertation conducts an impact evaluation of the Rural Education policy and its effects on educational indicators of students and schools located in rural settlement areas in the state of Ceará. For this purpose, data from the Ceará Permanent System of Basic Education Assessment (Spaece) from 2007 to 2019 are used, focusing on 9th grade elementary school students and 3rd-year high school students. The difference- n differences method, proposed by Sant’Anna and Zhao (2020), is employed to analyze the results on proficiency, and the logit model is applied to estimate the factors associated with high school dropout. With respect to performance on standardized exams, the results indicated that students from rural schools achieved similar outcomes to those of students from regular and full-time high schools, even though the Rural Education proposal did not have standardized exam performance as its central focus. This finding reflects the fact that all schools follow the same National Common Curricular Base, ensuring that the content taught is also covered in rural schools. On the other hand, the results of the logit model showed that attending a rural school reduces the likelihood of dropping out of high school when compared to regular and full-time schools. This evidence highlights the potential of the policy to promote the retention of young people in rural settlements within the educational system and to ensure the completion of the basic education cycle.