# **1. Introduction**

There have been many attempts of policy makers to improve human capital through changes in the legislation requirements for teacher education in developing countries. In the case of Brazil, the national government strived to improve the profile of teachers through the requirement of tertiary education for teaching in basic education in 1996. They passed the Law of Guidelines and Standards of Education (Law No. 9394/96, LDB) that stablished the year 2007 as deadline for all Brazilian basic education teachers to achieve tertiary education level.<sup>1</sup> School census data of the Ministry of Education (MEC) suggest that, although this goal has not been fully achieved so far, this law appears to have influenced profoundly pre-service teachers’ education. From 1995 to 2007, the percentage of teachers of basic education with higher education increased from 49% to 68%, then reached 83% in 2015. For upper secondary school teachers, this percentage increased from 82% to 93% in the period between 1995 and 2007, remaining stable until 2015.

At the same time, there was a significant increase in coverage of upper secondary education of 5.4 million to 8.1 million students from 1995 to 2015, which was achieved in detriment of improvements in quality. National Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB) results show a drop in the percentage of graduates of basic education with adequate levels of learning in both mathematics, from 11.6% to 7.3% of students, and in Portuguese, from 45.4% to 27.5% of students, from 1995 to 2015. It is possible that the massive incorporation into the educational system of out-of-school children from lower background families has negatively influenced the quality of elementary education at first and of secondary education years later. This seems consistent with the trajectory of the Portuguese learning indicator, which fell sharply up to 2005, showed a slight improvement until 2011 and stagnation afterwards, but does not seem to have had the same influence on the math learning indicator. Thus, it is not clear whether the variation in enrollments was able to counterbalance the positive effects expected from the improvement in teachers' schooling.

Figure 1 - Percentage of graduates of secondary education with adequate levels of learning in math and Portuguese and Enrollment in secondary education

|11.6<br>45.4<br>5.4|17.9<br>39.7<br>6.4|11.9<br>27.6<br>7.8|11.6<br>25.8<br>8.4|12.8<br>26.9<br>9.1|10.9<br>22.6<br>9.0|9.8<br>24.5<br>8.4|11.0<br>28.9<br>8.3|10.3<br>29.2<br>8.4|9.3<br>27.2<br>8.3|7.3<br>27.5<br>8.1|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|1995|1997|1999|2001|2003|2005|2007|2009|2011|2013|2015|
||||Math|Portu|guese|Enrol|lment (mil|lion)|||

_Note._ Minimum score on the SAEB scale that characterize adequate learning for students in 3<sup>rd</sup> grade of secondary education was 300 points for Portuguese and 350 points for math. _Source._ School Census and SAEB – INEP/MEC.

The literature has established the central role of teachers in student learning, but there is still no consensus on how teachers’ pre-service training affects teacher performance. Studies that measure the value-added of teachers in a school year find that students with a good teacher can achieve an average gain of one year; while students with great teachers might gain 1.5 grade levels (Hanushek and Rivkin 2010). In addition, teachers critically impact not only children’s immediate learning progress, but also their longterm development and life choices (Bruns and Luque, 2015). However, studies based on the educational production function, estimated from cross-sectional data and on regression analysis of aggregated levels of student performance, fail to find statistically significant effects of teacher education measures (Hanusheck, 2003). Other series of studies developed since the 2000s, based on student-level longitudinal data and involving broader sets of variables, and more recent research that addresses non-observed heterogeneity

> 1 Repealed by Law No. 12796/13, which reintroduced the secondary level Normal course as minimum level of training for teaching in early childhood education and in the first years of elementary school.

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