Northeast schools among the country's best

The Anísio Teixeira Institute for Research and Studies (Inep in the original acronym) released Wednesday (Jul 5) schools' preliminary performances on Brazil's 2014 National High School Examination—or Enem. The data reveal that the country's ten highest-ranking public schools are located in the Northeast.

To be listed, a school must meet the following requirements: students who took the exam must amount to above 90, of whom over 80 percent must have attended the school during all three years of high school;  and students must also have low or very low socioeconomic status.

Altogether, 25,640 educational institutions had their performance made public, from which 1,295,954 students sat the Enem.

At the top of the list is Escola Estadual de Educação Profissional Padre João Bosco de Lima, a state school in Mauriti, Ceará. According to Education Minister Renato Janine, however, the Inep is, for the first time, proposing alternate forms of ranking. “The school at the top isn't necessarily the best one, as external factors may have influenced the result. And, […] if you want to tell parents which school is the most suitable for their children, sometimes the one at the top may be too small and not have room available, or might have too strict a policy for admitting new students. […] We want to draw results nearer to the real world and look at schools' actual contribution,” he said.

Janine explained that the Ministry of Education adopted three major criteria for the compilation of the list. The first criterion is size. “They usually show a lower performance, because their students face a complex reality—the real world. Large schools can better prepare students for the real world, even though their marks are lower,” the minister argued.

Another determining factor has to do with how long a student has attended the institution. Janine says that some schools banish low-marking students, and take in the good ones for their last year of high school. “Banishing a student with poor marks improves the school's overall performance, but it's also not a legitimate measure. It doesn't give you an accurate overview on how the school prepared its students, because you're leaving information out,” he explained.

The Inep classifies schools into groups with 1 to 30, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, and 90 or more students each; and also according to how long their average student has attended the institution throughout the years of high school: 0% to 40%, 40% to 60%, 60% to 80%, and 80% or more.

In the minister's view, a school's socioeconomic status is key: “A school with poor or even extremely poor students will get a lower mark. But the same school may be doing a more important educational work. It may improve students' performance more considerably than higher-marking schools do, with their high socioeconomic level, as they improve the student's performance just a little,” explained.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira