Mobility and educational performance among high school students in Natal (RN, Brazil)

Abstract

Little explored in literature, the daily home-school traveling reflects a spatial incoherence between the distribution of the school age population and basic education schools (secondary level) in Natal, Brazil. In this paper, we explore the profile of the commuters (students) from an intra-municipal political and administrative perspective. Thus, we were able to capture the daily flows of students among Natal neighborhoods. For this, we use the concept of living space as theoretical foundation and the school census database in 2012. Thus, the correlation between the place of residence and student studies showed a relationship between the traveling to school and school performance, measured by age-grade distortion in a logistic regression model. We identified that the chance for a student to have a good academic performance is not associated to the proximity of his home to school. In this sense, the dynamics of the population in terms of school distribution and students may represent important aspects of urban management and the provision of educational services, particularly in a context where demographic trends point to a significant reduction in school-age population in the next years.

Keywords:
Spatial population mobility; Commuting; Academic achievement