Quality of education and performance of public schools in Minas Gerais at the Mathematical Olympiad

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the relationship between the quality of education - physical school infrastructure, pedagogical school structure, teachers, students, and educational policies - in public schools in the state of Minas Gerais as well as their performance in the OBMEP (Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools). This investigation stands out for its use of a quantitative approach by demonstrating that OBMEP is relational, based on the social quality of education, and adopts the perspective of uneven success of public schools in education-related policies. In existing literature, OBMEP has predominantly been discussed from a pedagogical viewpoint or taking the content of tests in consideration rather than as an action to be influenced within schools. With a sample of 420 public schools in the MG06 region of OBMEP, a Poisson regression model was applied to associate variables representing the social quality of education – including both in-school and extracurricular factors - with a performance in OBMEP, specifically the number of medals obtained by the schools. It was observed that to achieve satisfactory performance, to succeed in OBMEP and obtain awards, public schools need to have appropriate infrastructure, teaching conditions, students in favorable access and retention situations in regular education, as well as ongoing official intervention by developing public education policies. These results indicate greater commitment is required from political and social spheres in order to improve the quality of basic public education in Brazil and increase awareness of the OBMEP potential as a public policy intended for social inclusion rather than just for achieving results and awards.

Keywords
Public schools ; Quality of education ; OBMEP