Política de avaliação do ensino médio: uma análise envoltória de dados (DEA) a partir do IDEB para a identificação de escolas referência no Espírito Santo

Abstract

The Basic Education Development Index (IDEB) is recognized as the official parameter for the quality of national education. This designation grants it significant political legitimacy, underscoring its relevance for the evaluation and monitoring of our educational system. However, its public use often boils down to a simplistic interpretation, reducing it to a ranking where schools with higher scores are acknowledged as benchmarks for others, disregarding the diversity and peculiarities of the Brazilian educational system. In contrast to this trend, this thesis starts from the hypothesis that redefining this pre-existing idea of reference schools, by considering student characteristics, the plurality of educational contexts, and the tensions that shape the school reality, can support a more systemic analysis of outcome indicators, such as IDEB. In line with the overall objective, this study develops a referencebased finalistic indicator that allows for the classification of the relative performance of public high schools in the state of Espírito Santo, considering, in addition to IDEB, educational measures for context assessment. To achieve this, it was necessary to employ different theoretical and methodological approaches, delineating them in four interconnected chapters that engage with each other, aiming to address the specified objectives and presenting a theoretical-methodological framework linked to the overarching goal. The research is characterized as a plurimethodological type and implicitly adopts the right to education, constitutionally established, as an implicit theoretical reference. It is primarily a quantitative work that utilizes educational microdata provided by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP) and the State Department of Education of Espírito Santo as sources. In each chapter, schools were taken as the field of analysis to conduct instrumental case studies. Based on the main findings, the research confirms this hypothesis and advocates the thesis that enhancing this model of identifying reference schools fosters the development of a political culture that takes into account the multifaceted nature of the system in understanding its educational outcomes, thereby reducing selection practices and, consequently, exclusion. As a result of this shift, it is suggested that standardized assessment should be focused on higher spheres, and the results reaching schools should adopt a context assessment or institutional evaluation perspective. Through strategic planning, improvements in learning and contextual indicators influencing the educational process can be pursued.