Equity and performance in the National High School Exam: A study on sex and race in Brazilian municipalities

Abstract

This article discusses equity and inequality of performance for students of public schools, belonging to municipalities between 50 and 500 thousand inhabitants, who applied for ENEM 2017. Analyses segmented by race, sex, maternal education and family income indicated inequality of performance measured by math. For example, there is a better performance for White students, especially male and high-income students, and a strong loss for Black low-income female students. Intramunicipal analyzes are presented with the equity measured obtained through multilevel models (students, schools and municipalities) with random coefficients. Previous contributions, such as Alves et al. (2016), Travitzki et al. (2016) and Travitzki (2017) support this proposal. The results indicated that the majority of the most equitable municipalities in relation to sex and race obtained a lower average performance. On the other hand, the municipalities with less equity are, for the most part, above the average in mathematics. The municipalities that combine quality and equity have a higher family income, a high proportion of White students and a higher average socioeconomic level in the school. Public policies must be proposed in order to enable schools in municipalities with less equity to compensate for differences between social groups.