Potential heterogeneous treatment effect of education in public federal schools: an analysys of brazilian high school

In Brazil, the debate about the influence of different types of schools on the academic performance of students is fundamental, as it is immersed in the apparent low quality of Brazilian education, a nation lacking economic and social development. In this context, this paper aims to estimate the potential heterogeneous effects of studying in federal public high schools in Brazil on academic performance. As an empirical strategy, the causal forest method was used to estimate the effect of heterogeneous treatment and, as an indicator of academic performance, the scores of the National High School Exam (Enem) carried out in 2019, for a set of 565,759 students were used. It was found that, controlling for the 10 economic and social variables specified in the model, federal public schools achieve better results in terms of student performance than state public schools in all subjects. In addition, it was possible to verify a heterogeneous effect, that is, a higher level of performance, but with different amplitudes, for students from federal public schools in different states of the federation and with different levels of family income.