Escolas em Foco: The Impact Assessment of the 'Evidence-Based Public Policy' Program of Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal School System

Abstract

The paper assesses the impact of a data use program on student’s educational achievement in language and math in public schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The idea behind this kind of program is based on the perspective that interventions aimed to encourage the use of educational data for planning and pedagogical activities would bring changes in the attitudes, knowledge, and practices of school agents and, therefore, would contribute to engage student’s achievement and reduce inequalities. The impact of the program was examined using differences-in-differences statistical models (DiD). The first strategy of analysis did not include any pre-processing mechanism. In the second strategy, to reduce bias selection and increase the power of causal inference, the matching method was adjusted before DiD model. Although descriptive statistics suggest a constant increase in students’ academic performance and schools approval rates of both groups over four years of analysis, the results using both strategies are substantively weak and not statistically significant.