Distributional impacts of the Jovem de Futuro program

Abstract

This article evaluates the distributional impacts of an educational public-private partnership intervention called Jovem de Futuro (Youth of Future). By focusing on a results-based management model (RBM) and school autonomy, the program aims to improve high-school academic achievement and dropout rates in state public schools. We investigate the effects of the program on language and math scores for students from 123 treated schools in the state of Ceara. We report heterogeneous treatment effects across the score distribution for both disciplines using quantile treatment effects (QTE) models (Firpo, 2007). While treatment effects of the program were comparatively higher for top quantiles in math, the impact was bigger in bottom quantiles of the score distribution of language tests.