Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

In the year 2000 governments of all countries established the so-called Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Among the main objectives of these guidelines is to provide conditions so that each person (child, young or adults) can take advantage of educational opportunities to meet their basic needs. The Brazilian Indice de Desenvolvimento da Educacao Basica (IDEB), index created and calculated biannually by the National Institute of Educational Studies Teixeira (INEP), shows that the levels of proficiency in Portuguese and Mathematics is still below the target. Recent studies suggest that the shortage of public resources and the disorganization of these features are the causes for the poor performance. This study aims to analyze technical efficiency of primary education schools in the state capital of Santa Catarina State (with nearly 500 thousand inhabitants), in the South of Brazil. For this study, Data Envelopment Analysis models were applied using secondary data obtained from INEP. The results show that schools with large numbers of enrolled students tend to have more difficulty managing their human and physical resources, resulting in worse technical and scale scores. Finally, management actions are proposed in order to overcome the congestion of resources that causes inefficiency of the municipal schools.