مقررات آموزش و پرورش به عنوان ابزار توزیع درآمد: مورد سیرا

The concern regarding the quality of public educational systems has become increasingly important in recent years, which is justified due to the role that education has as an instrument to promote economic development and income distribution. Since there are imperfect credit markets and other limiting aspects, the market is not able to provide education in the amounts that society desires and, therefore, the government has to intervene directly to provide the service to those who are not able to afford private education. The problem is that there is a clear disparity in terms of quality between public and private education. The private system is supposedly able to regulate itself through competition, while public education needs to be regulated by the State in order to assure minimum quality levels. In the context of the State of Ceara (Brazil), two public educational regulatory systems are compared: a public voucher system and a system based on teacher incentives. In the voucher system, competition would provide incentives to public schools to increase their levels of efficiency, but it may originate some “centers of excellence”, penalizing the least efficient schools, and weak incentives to teachers may undermine its expected results. The system based on teacher incentives, on the other hand, could be considered as a form of “positive regulation” in the sense that there will be no sanctions to the worst schools. The idea is to reward, through pecuniary benefits, teachers and principals of those schools considered the best in terms of existing levels and/or in terms of improvement in the quality of the education provided. The main argument is that a system, such as the latter may induce a healthy competition among public schools that would end up improving teaching quality and achievement.

The concern regarding the quality of public educational systems is becoming increasingly important in recent years. In general, a common but yet concerning result is being observed: the quality of public education is not improving over the years (e.g., see Carneiro & Heckman, 2003). In Brazil, the Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica1 (SAEB), created in 1995, evaluates primary and secondary students every 2 years. And, in Ceara, the Sistema Permanente de Avaliação da Educação Básica2 (SPAECE), created in 1992, conducts annual evaluations only in public schools. They both measure the students’ performances based on standardized tests in Math and Portuguese. Grades are contained in the interval between 0 and 500. As an illustration of what is being happening in recent years in Brazil, Graph 1, presents the Brazilian average grade in SAEB during the period 1995–2003. As the graph illustrates, quality has been declining during the period in consideration.

As it has been discussed in this paper, some countries have been experiencing decreasing quality levels in public education. On the other hand, quality of private education does not present the same trend. The explanation for this comes from the endogenous regulation that exists in private markets due to competition, i.e., when a private school lacks quality it will end up losing an expressive share of its market or, in an extreme case, will have to close its doors. This phenomenon is a serious concern to society, basically because those with very few educational opportunities are exactly the ones that are the clients of the public school system. Hence, due to the low quality of public education a vicious cycle is built: people who have lower levels income usually have less formal schooling and since they cannot afford it, they will not be able to acquire high-quality education. And, it goes on and on. At the moment that a significant part of the population enters this vicious cycle, lower levels of schooling, and consequently of human capital, ends up negatively affecting the development process. In other words, a problem of inequality due to the absence of regulation will have impacts on social welfare. In this context, since the public system lacks this endogenous regulation imposed by competition, then it is necessary that the government puts a regulatory system in place. Two types of systems, widely discussed in the specialized literature have been analyzed: (i) a voucher system and (ii) a teacher incentive mechanism. In the case of Ceara, in particular, the latter system is supposedly more appropriate and easier to implement. The final message of the paper is that regulation of the quality of education affects the distribution of income. And, if this instrument is well designed, adequate to the specific conditions of the place where it is supposed to be implemented, and if it has continuity, then it can indeed become a very powerful public policy tool over time.