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Background
Professional shortage in Brazil has highlighted a constant problem, that has always been
ignored by the government throughout the years: education.
Brazil has made huge improvements towards reducing the levels of illiteracy in the country,
decreasing the number of illiterates from 16.3 million in 2000 to 13.2 million in 2012. During
2013 the government saw this reduction stagnate. Even financial incentives like the Bolsa
Familia, which was one of the best bets by the government to improve Brazilian education
levels, has proven to be ineffective and the country is still far from reaching literacy levels
found in other BRIC counterparts like Russia and China.
One of the biggest issues that Brazil faces, mainly due to a poor public education system, is
the fact that nearly 18% of the Brazilian population is functionally illiterate, meaning that
they know words and numbers but are unable to comprehend a sentence or perform a simple
mathematical operation. Perhaps what is most alarming is that according to research by the
Instituto Paulo Montenegro (IPM), related to research company Ibope, 38% of Brazilian
undergraduates are also functionally illiterate.
These figures show how fragile the educational system in Brazil is and the difficulties that the
government still needs to address in order to sustain the growth of the country.
There are several reasons that justify the movement towards private institutions. One of them
is that the rise of the lower classes has provided many families with the possibility to ensure
their children a better education at private schools. The other is due to the fact that public
schools still suffer from a lack of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, lack of security and
general issues with infrastructure.
Last but not least, the controversial law which allows students in public institutions to be
promoted to the next grade even if they fail, generates further skepticism to the effectiveness
of the public school learning.
The Brazilian educational system has several deficiencies throughout, but the difference
between students from private and public schools becomes even more aggravated when they
are competing for places at public universities. Different from education at Fundamental and
Secondary levels, public higher education still holds a paramount status, and the competition
for places at renowned universities, especially the Federal ones, is extremely fierce.
In an attempt to address this issue and provide a more balanced chance for the students
coming from public schools, the government created in 2012 a law guaranteeing them 50% of
the places in Federal universities and educational institutions. In addition to this quota,
several universities also reserve a percentage of the places for black, mixed race and
indigenous students.
The government also created a program called Prouni, which grants students from lower
income families partial or total scholarships at private universities. There is also a financing
programme by the Ministry of Education called Fundo de Financiamento Estudantil or FIES,
which allows students to finance the education at low interest rates, which can be used in
addition to Prouni.
However with the increasing number of private universities that offer courses with a rather
questionable quality, it seems that the issue related to education in Brazil is still far from
being resolved, and the country will still continue to struggle with functional illiteracy at
higher education for several years to come.
1 Introduction
Even though Brazil has reached almost universal enrollment in primary education, grade
repetition and school drop-out and push-out are common. As a result, com-pletion rates are
substantially lower than enrollment, and many children abandon school with relatively low
levels of completed education. The problem is partic-ularly acute in poorer neighborhoods.
Lower chances of finding a good job and poverty are some of the consequences of low
educational attainment. As illustrated by Perlman in the late 1960s, parents in the favela
[shantytown] would often tell their children that if they did not stay in school they would end
up as garbage collectors. In July 2003, the city [Rio de Janeiro] opened a competition for 400
garbage collector jobs, and 12,000 people applied. A high school diploma was a prerequisite
for application (Perlman 2003: 13). This paper aims at identifying the major drop-out and
push-out factors that lead to school abandonment in neighborhoods in Fortaleza, Northeast
Brazil. It re-lies on an extensive survey that specifically addressed possible risk factors faced
by the population in these neighborhoods, in particular the youth. The major advan-tages of
the survey are its wide coverage, of both in-school and out-of-school youth,of both genders,
and the wide set of issue s addressed, namely:socio-economic background; education; health
and sexuality; social capital and violence; and employment and economic activity.We are
particularly interested in evaluating the role of early parenthood, child labor and poverty
pushing children out of school. However, those variables are potentially endogenous,first
because there may be determinants of the schooling decision on which we have no
information and are therefore omitted from the set of explanatory variables we consider, and
second because child labor and early motherhood may be determined simultaneously with
school drop-out. We therefore estimate an economic model of school drop-out and push-out
using an instrumental variables method, taking advantage of the rich set of variables in the
dataset.From the question what age do you think is the ideal age to start having sexual
relationships? we derive an identifying instrument for early motherhood, since the belief
about this ideal age is likely to induce variation in the age at which parenthood first takes
place, but it should have no additional direct impact on the probability of leaving school.
Similarly, we use the question what is the minimum monthly salary that you would accept to
work? to instrument the variable child and youth labor. Again, the reasoning is that the
reservation wage is likely to be correlated with whether the child or youth works, affecting
the outcome of interest,whether (s)he attends school, solely through this channel of the labor
decision.
approach was, in some cases, the idea that school attendance and child labor are mutually
exclusive activities if the child is working, (s)he is not attending school and vice-versa. In
other cases, work was included among the exogenous factors explaining school performance.
Results suggested that poverty, as captured for
example by the number of siblings or the work status of the father, is a determinant of child
labor and of poor school performance.
Later studies acknowledged the possibility of combining work and school, in par-ticular in
countries where school lasts just half-day. One method followed was the estimation of a
multinomial logit model involving four possible states: specializa-tion in school;
specialization in labor; combination of both activities; or inactivity.
Other authors accounted for the interdependence of the two decisions by estimat-ing bivariate
probit models. This allows, not just for an easy direct comparison of the impact of each
variable on the probability of working and of studying, but also for the quantification of the
non-explainable correlation between the two deci-sions, associated with unobserved
factors.Both of these methods assume that the decisions on school and work are taken
simultaneously. In the same vein, Rosati and Rossi estimated a simultaneous model of school
attendance and hours worked. Some of the results in this literature, though not completely
consensual,
are: older children and males are more prone to combine school and work; older siblings are
less likely to attend school; lower ability children are more likely to drop-out of school,
specializing in work or becoming idle; there is intergenerational persistence in child labor
status; higher family socio-economic status increases the
probability that the child will stay in school and decreases the probability that (s)he will
work; on the other hand, poverty motivates specialization in just labor or inactivity; families
that run a business are more likely to have their children working, though not necessarily
abandoning school; negative shocks a ffecting the
household, such as the father becoming unemployed, raise the probability that the child will
leave school and enter the labor market; there is a negative unexplained correlation between
attending school and working.Fitzsimons though going back
to the assumption that child labor is the reverse of school attendance, provides further
exploration of the role of income shocks. Going beyond the idea that the current level of household income determines
the probability that the child will abandon school to work, she tests whether also the riskiness
of the household income stream matters. Indeed, child labor could be used by the family as an
insurance mechanism against fluctuations in income, in countries where insurance markets
are underdeveloped. Her results lend support to the hypothesis that child labor has an
insurance role, protecting against earnings volatility at the aggregate (village) level, whereas
idiosyncratic
(household level) risk is handled without resorting to the use of child labor. Pal explicitly
took into account the sequential nature of schooling pro-gression, to estimate a sequential
probit model. She
finds that the determinants of school success differ according to the school level, with
parental education being very relevant for primary school performance. Bedi and Marshall
con-centrate on the interrelation between school attendance and school achievement,
finding that children with a higher expected achievement are more likely to attend school.Still
more recently, the endogeneity of child labor in regressions explaining schooling outcomes
has been recognized , leading to the estimation of instrumen-tal variable models. Different
variables that shift the probability that the child
works, while not having a direct impact on schooling outcomes, have been used.Gunnarsson
et al explored variation across countries in the entry and exit ages of compulsory school;
Ravallion and Wodon explored variation across villages in the participation in a food-forschool program; Beegle et al used variation across regions in rice prices and natural disasters
in Vietnam. Results indicate that child labor lowers school performance. However, Ravallion
and Wood find that the schooling subsidy, while strongly raising school attendance, reduced
child labor to a much lower extent, since school parallel to labor is feasible due to the short
duration of daily class time. Orazem and Gunnarsson provide an overview of the literature
on the impact of labor on school outcomes, and in particular a discussion of
instruments.Instrumental variables has also been the empirical approach followed by Chatterji and DeSimone , who used alcohol consumption in the previous month as instrument in
their study of the impact of alcohol consumption on high school
drop-out; similarly, Roebucket used indicators of religiosity to study the impact of drug use
on schooling outcomes. We will follow this methodological line to study the factors pushing
children out of school.
Student dropouts in south Subcontinent
Causes of students dropouts vary region to region [15]. In South Asia dropout
rate is high in some countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. If
people in subcontinent want their children to grow, take part in productivity and
be good citizen then countries in Subcontinent must focus on their education
system and should make sure the attendance of children in their schools and
promote awareness regarding education for those who never attended school.
There is inverse relationship between level of social capital and trend in
students dropouts [16]. UNICEF reported that around 7.57 million children who
are 5 to 10 years old never attend school in South Asia, and 25.29 million
children should study in secondary education but they does not in school at all.
Figures of dropout rate reflected that Subcontinent region is top second region
where children do not educating and dropping out. Sub-Sahara Africa is on the
top of list by dropping out rate. Researcher discussed the reasons of low
educational position in Pakistan, researcher argued that the major factor that
contributes backwardness of educational system is fragmented and all the
boards working independently, and have no coordination between regulatory
authorities [17]. Subcontinent got substantial success in establishment of proper
education system and these efforts results in an increase in enrolment of
children for primary level education. In 2011 about 90% students enrolled in
primary schools.
Causes of student dropouts
Financially weak students have high possibility to dropout .Poor attendance was
major reason of students dropout without completion. Researcher also found
that those students also dropout whose parents do not interested in their study.
Researcher studied that students dropouts when they depressed by their poor
are depressed by their poor academic performance. Study explores the
relationship of students dropouts with social, institutional, economic and
personal aspects. Findings of previous research shows that there are many socioeconomic factors such as high cost of institutes, parents are not interested to
educate their children instead they want their children to work and earn, early
marriage, security problems that caused the drop out of students from
polytechnic institutes.
Children having different age and capacities study in a joint classroom, without
adoption of appropriate teaching methods, learning and induce to participate in
the School.Researcher examined that mostly the students who belonged to poor
family background students dropouts, their parents were uneducated and
earned less income that was not sufficient to fulfill their expenses. Researcher
also find that students drop their school due to poor health caused by poor diet
and starvation, distance between their institute and house or from their town,
lack of awareness and lack of teaching staff are common causes of dropouts.
Findings of previous studies shown that inequalities of education system and
poor family background also helps in student dropout . Describing the causes of
students dropouts researcher founded that Distance to schools, bad quality of
the education, inadequate school environment and building, overloaded class
rooms, improper languages of teaching, carelessness of teachers and security
problem in girls school, were common causes which increase school dropouts. In
Pakistan there are so many children who leave the schools without completing
their education. With other reasons corporal punishment is one of the major
reasons to contribute high rate drop outs in Pakistan. Open and good atmosphere
increased the chances of students to learn more and lower the students
dropouts Dropout rate increased due to boring environment of school and
outsides of buildings, lack of facilities in school and bad physical atmosphere.
Besides other factor poverty highly contributes to students dropouts
Effect of student dropouts on economy
Education is vital for economic development. According to Vision 2030,
Education is key component of economic growth because it has directly
influence on entrepreneurship, productivity growth and then increases
employment opportunities and women empowerment. Education helps in making
potential youth for the enhancement of ability, creativity and systematically skills
to contest with the fast changing Global inclination. Students drop outs reduces
literacy rate of country and non-innovative environment.
Due to Students drop outs economy also have to pay cost; class of students
dropouts will cost the country over $200 billion during their existence in lost
earnings and unrealized tax revenue every year [25]. People without education
unable to get jobs and more likely to spend their lives jobless or on government
assistance. These students often struggle with poverty, abuse or neglect in their
homes. It is imperative investment for human and economic development. This
human capital accelerates economic activity and development. Extensive
literature review has been conducted to conceptualize the theme of study, and to
generalize the concept to a wider range of population. Comparative analysis of
past studies has been conducted in order to find out various causes of students
dropouts. Researcher tries to emphasize on logical reasoning while discussing
the objectives and giving suggestions in the study.
The
current
Brazilian education system is based
on the 1988 Constitution,
which highlighted
education as a universal right that
should be promoted and protected by
the government.
In 1996,
the National Education Guidelines
and Framework Law (
Lei d
e Diretrizes e Bases da Educao
)
or LBD, was passed. This law
required a common national basis for
curricul
um
in primary and
secondary education, increased the
length and number of teaching days
, accounted for the
evaluation of courses and institutions
at
all education levels
, allowed for the integration of
Education Bodies
Education in Brazil is supervised by
a system of ministries and
government offices that work
together at the municipality, state and
federal level. Municipalities are
responsible for providing
Higher Education
Educao Superior
Admission to universities in Brazil is based on the completion of
secondary school as well as the
scores on entrance exams. Traditionally, each university had its own
entrance exam, called the
vestibular
. The
vestibular
tests students on a variety of subjects. The exam var
ies by institution.
Brazilian students often take extra courses after the completion of
secondary school to prepare
for the
vestibular
.
Another entrance exam is the
Exame Nacional do Ensino Mdio
(
ENEM
).The ENEM was
launched in 1998 as a means of assessi
ng the
quality of Brazilian education. I
n 2009 the
(4 Years)
In most cases, a
Mestre
is required for admission. For select programs, a student can be admitted
with a
Bacharel
. A thesis or dissertation is required for graduation. The Doutorado is
also
considered
stricto sensu
.