A Infra-Estrutura das Escolas Brasileiras de Ensino Fundamental: Um Estudo com Base nos Censos Escolares de 1997 a 2005

This paper uses data from the annual School Census to describe the physical and human resource infrastructure available to Brazilian primary schools. We investigate access to basic services such as water, electricity, and sewage; facilities available in the school; existence of a library or reading room; information and communication technology; and, finally teacher qualification. In the case of facilities and library description we were forced to create an index, given the volume of information available in the School Census each year. Our first conclusion is that material schooling conditions improved greatly between 1997 and 2005 but educational attainment and achievement did not change much during this period. Second, there are no major differences in resources between state and private school, although there are large differences between these two and municipal schools. This is again a curious result since there are very small differences in attainment and achievement between state and municipal schools but large differences between state and private schools. These two results put in doubt the impacts that improving infrastructure will have upon educational results. Our last finding, however, leans in the opposite direction. Rural schools suffer both very poor material conditions and very poor educational results. This suggests that perhaps improving material conditions in the very worse schools, which are almost all rural, may have strong impacts upon attainment or achievement. Finally, an important conclusion of this text is that more investigation is urgently needed investigating the link between infrastructure data from administrative sources and educational results.