Evaluation of the efficiency of education spending on secondary school attendance
Efficiency; School dropout; Public spending.
The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between the efficiency of public spending on education in secondary education and the school attendance of students in Brazilian states. School dropout is a chronic problem in the country's education, and its negative impacts go beyond students who drop out of school. This problem affects the quality and efficiency of the educational system, resulting in an underutilization of financial resources invested in education. Data from the School Census and the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2015 to 2021 were used to carry out this analysis. This is an ex-post-facto research of a quantitative and correlational nature that uses technical procedures based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the objective of measuring the technical efficiency of public spending in secondary education in Brazilian states, where we sought to analyze the efficiency of individual states in relation to school attendance in secondary education based on a set of pre-selected inputs and outputs. The results obtained from the data collected suggest that the analysis of the score results when compared with the input Net Attendance Rate is not sufficient to define a direct correlation with the superior performance of the states. The state of Ceará (CE) was also found to be reference in the optimal efficiency ratio of educational expenditure in secondary education.