University of São Paulo: USP project aims to reduce educational inequality in cities in the interior of SP
Improving school learning levels is urgent in all education networks in Brazil, especially after the covid-19 pandemic, which further accentuated educational inequality in the country. This is exactly the objective of the Sérgio Henrique Ferreira Chair, from the Institute of Advanced Studies Polo Ribeirão Preto at USP (IEA-RP), in a project carried out in partnership with the Teaching Profession movement and with funding from B3 Social. At the end of July, partnerships were signed with the Municipal Education Departments of Ribeirão Preto, Bebedouro and Batatais to start the actions.
The project is the result of chair studies that used the statistical technique of principal component analysis. Widely used in chemistry, the area of training of the chair’s holder, Mozart Neves Ramos, the technique, when applied to the educational area, allows working with matrices of variable size and a number of indicators defined according to the interest of each manager. In this way, it is possible to establish goals for the improvement of public educational policies in the medium and long term based on scientific evidence.
According to Ramos, the initial studies used five educational indicators from 2017 linked to school learning for the initial and final years of Elementary School in 27 municipal public schools in Ribeirão Preto: the percentages of adequate learning in Portuguese and in mathematics ( target 3 of All For Education – every child with adequate learning for their year ); Ideb broken down into its two components, school learning and the pass rate; and age-grade distortion. The work was published in 2020 on the Nova Escola Portal and, later, a more expanded study, including data from 2019, resulted in an article for the Revista Ensaio – Avaliação e Políticas Públicas em Educação, from Fundação Cesgranrio., last year.
“What does this technique do? It takes this multidimensional matrix and tries, from each axis, called the main component, to extract as much information as possible to explain the difference between schools in relation to the indicators considered in the analysis. In the case of the initial years, for example, only the first two components were able to explain 96% of all the variance of the matrix, which was translated into a two-dimensional graph. The most relevant indicators were linked to goal 3 of Todos Pela Educação”, says the professor.
Use in other cities
More recently, the same work was carried out with data from 2017 and 2019 from the municipal schools of Bebedouro and Batatais, which allowed the researchers of the chair to have a base of what can be improved to reduce educational inequality in these two municipalities. In addition, a partnership with MindLab, a company specialized in research and development of educational technologies, allowed the creation of dashboards (visual panels with information, metrics and indicators) from this statistical modeling and using data for other cities. This will allow the application of the project in any other municipality that is interested.
“We have analyzes here of all the more than 5,000 Brazilian municipalities already ready and with an addendum: in addition to municipal schools, we have indicators for state schools and federal institutes. And, mainly, we have the possibility of having this comparison on the same graph, how are municipal schools in relation to state schools and federal institutes. Our commitment is to help the chair more and more in the development of these panels, so that we can be an arm, an incentive, even, for research in the area of education. It is a very important demand to try to better understand this post-pandemic scenario”, explains MindLab’s strategic project manager, Thiago Zola.
Use in other cities
More recently, the same work was carried out with data from 2017 and 2019 from the municipal schools of Bebedouro and Batatais, which allowed the researchers of the chair to have a base of what can be improved to reduce educational inequality in these two municipalities. In addition, a partnership with MindLab, a company specialized in research and development of educational technologies, allowed the creation of dashboards (visual panels with information, metrics and indicators) from this statistical modeling and using data for other cities. This will allow the application of the project in any other municipality that is interested.
“We have analyzes here of all the more than 5,000 Brazilian municipalities already ready and with an addendum: in addition to municipal schools, we have indicators for state schools and federal institutes. And, mainly, we have the possibility of having this comparison on the same graph, how are municipal schools in relation to state schools and federal institutes. Our commitment is to help the chair more and more in the development of these panels, so that we can be an arm, an incentive, even, for research in the area of education. It is a very important demand to try to better understand this post-pandemic scenario”, explains MindLab’s strategic project manager, Thiago Zola.
Cooperation between schools
Another work that is contributing to a better visualization of the analyzes is that of the student of Applied Mathematics at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP) at USP, Leomar da Silva. He created topological maps and graphs that help managers to understand in a simple way the behavior of schools from these analyses. In the first type of graph, called bar race , Silva used data from the Ideb historical series from 2007 to 2019 for municipal schools in Ribeirão Preto that underwent evaluation by the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb) in every year.
“This graph is interesting to identify some cases and understand what happened during the historical series, what happened in the historical school trajectory of this school so that the performance changed. It’s the same for schools with good performance or schools with greater difficulties, understanding what their particularities are so that we can try to get good practices out of this for the entire network”, he explains.
In the second chart model, the student created a map with data extracted from the principal components analysis carried out by the chair. It is possible to identify schools with different performances. “You can see that sometimes there is even a totally geographical difference, where one part has schools with greater difficulty and another with less difficulty. I believe that, as a public policy tool, this instrument is interesting to see districts and really build a more focused public policy for each region, making correlations with the socioeconomic development of the municipality”, he says.
Training of managers
The project financed by B3 Social includes, in addition to the statistical modeling part, two other fronts: the training of managers and the promotion of cooperation between schools through the creation of learning communities. The training of managers is starting its activities this month, based on interviews with school principals in Ribeirão Preto and the application of questionnaires by the post-doctoral student at the IEA-RP and head of evaluation at the Instituto Reúna, Filomena Siqueira. With these data, she intends to develop a matrix with rubrics that can guide the development, in the local education network, of the competencies foreseen in the Common National Base of Competencies of the School Director. She will also make a presentation about this work to the Batatais Municipal Department of Education, so that it also begins to be developed in the municipality.
Batatais, by the way, approved at the end of July a bill to regulate the process of selecting directors for municipal schools. The document was based on Filomena’s research and also provides that directors must participate in pedagogical-administrative training programs defined by the Secretariat with the support of the chair.
“The administration understands that the role of the director goes beyond bureaucratic functions, but that he must have a leadership profile and with pedagogical management capacity, with a bond with the community, for which the contest cannot measure, as well as making it difficult to change, if necessary. In this sense, in addition to the legal framework, in the justification of the project, the Secretary of Education based the proposal on the research of Filomena Siqueira, who in her doctoral thesis demonstrated the relationship between the pedagogical management of the director and the performance of students”, explains the professor. Municipal Secretary of Education of Batatais, Victor Hugo Junqueira.
For Mozart Ramos, working with evidence, as the project is doing, and showing the benefits of this to society is fundamental for perennial public educational policies. “We still sin a lot in lack of focus and this lack of focus happens due to the discontinuity of policies. The best way to combat discontinuity is through two things: bringing results and making them available to society, so that it embraces that strategy and understands its importance.”