Impact assessment of public-private partnerships for education: a case study for schools in Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This article realized an impact assessment of elementary schools located at Belo Horizonte (BH) that were built and are managed in the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) modality, aiming to evaluate the performance of students from these schools and comparing them to the performance of students in conventional elementary schools, that is, traditional municipal schools. To achieve this goal, the scores of the Portuguese language and mathematics subjects of the SAEB exam in the years 2017 and 2019 were used as a proxy for performance. The results were heterogeneous and showed a modest positive impact. However, the findings suggest that the superior performance of students from PPP schools may be related to the better infrastructure offered by these schools and, also, are directly related to a longer time of exposure to treatment, that is, that the greater the number of years attended by students within a PPP school, the better their performance.

Keywords: public private partnerships (PPPs); education; infrastructure.