School Infrastructure and Socioeconomic Status in Brazil

In the last decades, Brazil has just about reached the universalization of the access to school and education for children and teenagers, between the ages of 6 to 14. A similar phenomenon has occurred in other developing countries, mainly in Latin America, where the widening of the access to school took place as a result of, above all, the inclusion of the poorer population groups. Families and groups, historically excluded from the school system, started to attend educational institutions. This change was noticed and studied by the sociology of education in Brazil, which altered the focus of its research, going from discussions centered on the access to education to studies related to the educational quality. This paper is part of this collection of recent studies. The central question of this research enquires about which schools the low-income Brazilians study at and the infrastructure conditions of the educational institutions attended by different socioeconomic groups. With the use of data from the Education Census from 2013, this paper presents a categorization of the infrastructure of the elementary public schools. By forming the diverse institution profile groups, this study relates these different groups of schools to the socioeconomic status of their students. In order to identify the socioeconomic status of the students of each school, this paper uses the data from the Bolsa Família, social welfare program, which benefits poor and extremely poor families with cash transfers. Therefore, the schools were classified according to a scale of socioeconomic status, based on the percentage of students included in this Program. The relation between the infrastructure conditions of the educational institutions and the socioeconomic profile of their students showed that the low-income groups have access to schools of worse infrastructure, confirming the inequality of educational opportunities between the rich and the poor in Brazil