Measure of gap and inequalities in basic education students proficiencies

Abstract

This study uses students performance on standardized tests as evidence of the quality of education and introduces a methodology based on the comparison of performance distributions to produce indicators for both the level achieved by the students and the learning gap between social groups, two inseparable dimensions of quality of education. In the first case, the study compares the distribution of the group observed with a reference distribution, which represents an ideal situation of where students should be. In the second, it compares the performance distribution of students belonging to social groups defined by socioeconomic characteristics. This article uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to characterize the differences between the distributions. This measure takes into account types of diferences not considered by other measures and have solid conceptual justifications. The proposed methodology is used to describe the quality of Brazilian basic education using the test results applied biannually to all Brazilian students of basic education.