Letícia J. Marteleto

Educational Inequality by Race in Brazil, 1982–2007: Structural Changes and Shifts in Racial Classification

Despite overwhelming improvements in educational levels and opportunity during the past three decades, educational disadvantages associated with race still persist in Brazil. Using the nationally representative Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra por Domicílio (PNAD) data from 1982 and 1987 to 2007, this study investigates educational inequalities between white, pardo (mixed-race), and black Brazilians over the 25-year period. Although the educational advantage of whites persisted during this period, I find that the significance of race as it relates to education changed. By 2007, those identified as blacks and pardos became more similar in their schooling levels, whereas in the past, blacks had greater disadvantages. I test two possible explanations for this shift: structural changes and shifts in racial classification. I find evidence for both. I discuss the findings in light of the recent race-based affirmative action policies being implemented in Brazilian universities.

Small families and large cohorts: The impact of the demographic transition on schooling in Brazil

This paper analyzes the effects of changing age structure and family size on schooling in Brazil. Cohorts born before 1982 were born during a period of falling family size but increasing cohort size. We show that the growth of the school-aged population peaked around 1990, coinciding with the onset of increasing enrollment rates in the 1990s. Pooling household survey data from 1977 to 1999, we estimate the effect of family size, cohort growth, and parental schooling on school enrollment. All have effects in the predicted directions, with the combined variables explaining over 70% of increased enrollment over the period.

The Changing Impact of Family Size on Adolescents’ Schooling: Assessing the Exogenous Variation in Fertility Using Twins in Brazil

Researchers have long been interested in the influence of family size on children’s educational outcomes. Simply put, theories have suggested that resources are diluted within families that have more children. Although the empirical literature on developed countries has generally confirmed the theoretical prediction that family size is negatively related to children’s education, studies focusing on developing societies have reported heterogeneity in this association. Recent studies addressing the endogeneity between family size and children’s education have also cast doubt on the homogeneity of the negative role of family size on children’s education. The goal of this study is to examine the causal effect of family size on children’s education in Brazil over a 30-year period marked by important social and demographic change, and across extremely different regions within the country. We implement a twin birth instrumental variable approach to the nationally representative 1977–2009 PNAD data. Our results suggest an effect of family size on education that is not uniform throughout a period of significant social, economic, and demographic change. Rather, the causal effect of family size on adolescents’ schooling resembles a gradient that ranges from positive to no effect, trending to negative.

The influence of older classmates on adolescent sexual behavior in Cape Town, South Africa.

This study examines the influence of exposure to older within-grade peers on sexual behavior among students in urban South Africa. Data are drawn from the Cape Area Panel Study, a longitudinal survey of young people conducted in metropolitan Cape Town from 2002 to 2006. The combination of early sexual debut, high rates of school enrollment into the late teens, and grade repetition create an environment in which young people who progress through school ahead of many in their cohort interact with classmates who may be several years older. We construct a measure of cumulative exposure to classmates who are at least two years older and show that such exposure is statistically significantly associated with early sexual initiation among adolescent girls. This exposure also increases the age difference between these girls and their first sexual partner, and helps explain a significant proportion of the earlier sexual debut of African girls, compared with colored and white girls in Cape Town.

The Educational Achievement of Brazilian Adolescents Cultural Capital and the Interaction between Families and Schools

Most studies find a positive correlation between family cultural capital and educational achievement. As compelling as the evidence on the advantages of family cultural capital for educational achievement is, most studies have focused on countries characterized by having a large middle class and high levels of income, not addressing societies with high levels of social inequality. Importantly, few studies have examined whether schools interact with families in determining the relationship between cultural capital and educational achievement. The goal of this article is to examine how cultural capital is associated with achievement in Brazil, one of the most unequal countries in the world. Using data from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), results from multilevel models show that the science and reading achievement gaps associated with cultural capital are magnified in Brazilian schools, an important finding given that the country is an already highly stratified society.

Instability in Parent–Child Coresidence and Adolescent Development in Urban South Africa

There is widespread recognition of the importance of family stability for child development. South Africa presents an interesting context in which to study the consequences of family instability because of the traditionally fluid nature of household composition due to labor migration, child fostering, and non-marital fertility. More recently, the HIV pandemic has added another source of instability. Within South Africa, however, patterns of instability differ markedly across racial groups. We use the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS) data to examine the implications of changes in parent-child coresidence for educational and sexual development of young South Africans. We show that changes in maternal and paternal coresidence have implications for the timing of sexual initiation for both black and coloured adolescents. Maternal and paternal transitions also lead to poorer educational outcomes for coloured adolescents, but parental disruptions are not significantly related to educational outcomes for blacks. These findings suggest that the implications of coresidential instability vary by race, reflecting racial differences with respect to cultural, social, and economic conditions.

Desigualdades de oportunidades educacionais dos adolescentes no Brasil e no México

The aim of this paper is to examine recent trends in educational stratification for adolescents in Brazil and in Mexico in three distinct periods: the 1980s, years of severe recession, the 1990s, a period of structural adjustment, and the 2000s, a decade of growth. In addition to school enrollment and educational transitions, we also examined enrollment in private schools, an important aspect of educational inequality rarely addressed in studies on this topic. We used nationally representative data from the PNAD for Brazil and ENIGH for Mexico. Our findings confirm the significant benefits brought by recent improved conditions of universal primary education, but also identify increasing disadvantages associated with access to private schools, suggesting the importance of the EMI perspective (Effectively Maintained Inequality). The study emphasizes the importance of examining the quality in addition to the quantity of formal education for a deeper understanding of educational stratification in both Brazil and Mexico.

Racial Inequality in Education in Brazil: A Twins Fixed-Effects Approach

Racial disparities in education in Brazil (and elsewhere) are well documented. Because this research typically examines educational variation between individuals in different families, however, it cannot disentangle whether racial differences in education are due to racial discrimination or to structural differences in unobserved neighborhood and family characteristics. To address this common data limitation, we use an innovative within-family twin approach that takes advantage of the large sample of Brazilian adolescent twins classified as different races in the 1982 and 1987–2009 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios. We first examine the contexts within which adolescent twins in the same family are labeled as different races to determine the characteristics of families crossing racial boundaries. Then, as a way to hold constant shared unobserved and observed neighborhood and family characteristics, we use twins fixed-effects models to assess whether racial disparities in education exist between twins and whether such disparities vary by gender. We find that even under this stringent test of racial inequality, the nonwhite educational disadvantage persists and is especially pronounced for nonwhite adolescent boys.

The Educational Consequences of Adolescent Childbearing and Union Formation in Brazil: The Educational Consequences of Adolescent Childbearing and Union Formation in Brazil

While Brazil has high rates of adolescent fertility for its below-replacement total fertility rate, we know little about the causal effects of adolescent childbearing and adolescent union formation for womens education. In this paper, we examine unique data from the 2013 School-to-Work Transitions Survey to address the consequences of adolescent childbearing and adolescent union formation on educational outcomes of Brazilian young women. We apply several analytical strategies to address the endogeneity between adolescent childbearing and educational outcomes. Our findings suggest that childbearing during the teenage years is detrimental to the educational attainment of Brazilian women, and that educational disadvantages persist once we take into account mothers selection into adolescent childbearing. The penalty for adolescent mothers ranges from -1.66 to -1.80 fewer years of schooling and from 41 to 35 percent difference in the probabilities of graduating from high school. Additional findings show that marital unions among adolescent mothers have a compounding role at further hindering womens educational progress. Combined, our findings suggest that young mothers, particularly those in a marital union, face additional layers of disadvantages, demonstrating that early family formation is a meaningful stratifier for women in an already highly-stratified society.

Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Diet Behaviors within Brazilian Families

Existing literature documents the key role that parents play in transmitting diet behaviors to their children; however, less is known about differences by parent and child gender within families, especially with attention to household socioeconomic status (SES). We use nationally representative household data from Brazil and ask how parent-child associations of diet behavior differ by gender within lower- and higher-SES households. Results indicate that both maternal and paternal diet behaviors are associated with sons’ and daughters’ diet behaviors, but the strength of these associations differs depending on the gender of both the parent and the child. Moreover, gender differences in parent-child diet resemblance exist primarily in lower-, but not in higher-SES households. These findings are important for understanding health processes that occur within families and lead to disparities across generations, especially in a middle-income country undergoing sharp economic and nutritional changes.