Assessing student's achievement gap between ethnic groups in Brazil

TL;DR

This study analyzes achievement gaps among ethnic groups in Brazil using national exam data, revealing socio-economic factors significantly influence performance and ethnic gaps are generally small or insignificant, especially among low-income students.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of ethnic achievement gaps in Brazil, highlighting the impact of socio-economic variables and challenging genetic explanations for performance differences.

Findings

Gaps are insignificant or small in low-income households.

Higher income may increase ethnic gaps.

Socio-economic factors significantly influence student performance.

Abstract

Achievement gaps refer to the difference in the performance on examinations of students belonging to different social groups. Achievement gaps between ethnic groups have been observed in several countries with heterogeneous populations. In this paper, we analyze achievement gaps between ethnic populations in Brazil by studying the performance of a large cohort of senior high-school students in a standardized national exam. We separate ethnic groups into the Brazilian states to remove potential biases associated to infrastructure and financial resources, cultural background and ethnic clustering. We focus on the disciplines of mathematics and writing that involve different cognitive functions. We estimate the gaps and their statistical significance through the Welch's t-test and study key socio-economic variables that may explain the existence or absence of gaps. We identify that gaps between ethnic groups are either statistically insignificant (p<.01) or small (2%-6%) if statistically significant, for students living in households with low income. Increasing gaps however may be observed for higher income. On the other hand, while higher parental education is associated to higher performance, it may either increase, decrease or maintain the gaps between White and Black, and between White and Pardo students. Our results support that socio-economic variables have major impact on student's performance in both mathematics and writing examinations irrespectively of ethnic backgrounds, giving evidence that genetic factors have little or no effect on ethnic group performance when students are exposed to similar cultural and financial contexts.