Contextual evaluation indicators and educational outcomes of the Ideb: an analysis of state high schools in Espírito Santo

Abstract

This study aims to investigate which factors, external to the school's control, influence their educational outcomes in the Basic Education Development Index (Ideb). It is a cross-sectional, quantitative, and exploratory-descriptive study, employing multiple linear regression to verify the effect of 13 contextual evaluation indicators of basic education on the school performance of 222 high schools supervised by the state of Espírito Santo in 2019 Ideb. Through the stepwise method, four of them were selected to compose the regression model, revealing 50.8% of the variations in the Ideb score. The factor with the greatest impact was age-grade distortion rate, indicating that schools with a higher number of students lagging behind in school face more pronounced challenges in achieving good results in Ideb, even when controlling other variables. Subsequently, the percentage of students declared as being white and the socioeconomic level, respectively, were directly related to the indices obtained by the schools, reflecting racial, social, and economic inequalities. The fourth factor identified was the teacher efforts, signaling that teachers' workload can harm the quality of teaching and students' learning. These results reaffirm the importance of considering the context in which schools are inserted to evaluate their performances in Ideb. However, this contextualization does not imply that students' performance should be predetermined by the school's characteristics, but rather that it is essential to incorporate it into education monitoring and the development of public policies that address their specificities.