schools)<sup>9</sup> to 12,924 schools in 2011 (14.5 percent of state schools and 4.4 percent of municipal schools).

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the short- and medium-term impacts of _Mais Educação_ on school outcomes. We exploit publically available data from _Prova Brasil_ and from the annual Brazilian school census. We also exploit administrative data on program participation provided by MEC. Because the program was rolled out over time, we compare the average educational outcomes of students in participating and in nonparticipating schools between 2007 (before the program was implemented) and 2011 (when the program reached a total of 6.2 percent of Brazilian public schools).

The main challenge, however, is that participating schools, and their students, are likely to have different abilities and come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and thus have different outcomes than nonparticipating schools. Actually, our evidence shows that, on average, participating schools had worse outcomes than schools not participating in 2007. This is partly a consequence of the selection criteria into the program: Targeting is aimed at schools with a low _Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica_ (IDEB) and/or located in areas of social vulnerability, and within schools at students with learning deficits. Hence, to assess the impact of the program we cannot simply compare participating and nonparticipating schools. Instead, we compare the performance over time in participating schools and nonparticipating schools that are as similar as possible to participating schools both in observable and unobservable characteristics.

We exploit propensity score matching to select schools that do not participate in _Mais Educação_ and ensure that they are very similar to treatment schools. We use this method to attempt ultimately to control for the selection bias by selecting a control group of schools that are very similar in a wide set of observable characteristics to those participating in _Mais Educação_ . The differences-in-differences estimator (comparing the changes in outcomes for the same schools before and after the program) allows us to control for unobserved characteristics of schools, potentially correlated with the take up of _Mais Educação_ , and that are constant over time. Unfortunately, it is possible that timevarying characteristics—correlated with program take up—exist that we cannot account for and that could be biasing the results. These include, for instance, possible changes in the profile of the school directors or in the support provided by subnational _Secretarias de Educação_ , providing closer monitoring and support to schools.

Our findings show that in the medium term, participation in _Mais Educação_ has, on average, no impact on school dropout rates, which suggests reduced impacts of the program in student composition during this period. We also do not find evidence that the program tends to be more effective earlier in the fundamental education cycle. Nevertheless, the program shows a statistically significant and negative impact on mathematics test scores and no average impact on Portuguese test scores. This holds for both the fifth and the ninth grades. We also show that the negative impacts on mathematics achievement are stronger in the short term and for schools that joined the

> 9 The program covered 1 percent of Brazilian municipalities in 2008.

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