Household composition and academic performance in the elementary level in Brazil

Abstract

Children with divorced parents or children living in single-parent families are expected to achieve lower academic performance in standardized tests when compared to children living with two biological parents. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of those disparities remain poorly addressed in the Brazilian literature. We compared the performance of students in the 5th-grade at the elementary level using Saeb of 2017 for Mathematics and Portuguese. The main objective was to address the differences between students living with: mother and father; mother and social father; mother only or with aggregates; father and social mother; father only or with aggregates; and other arrangements. Children living with their mother and a social father or with both biological parents had higher performances. Nonetheless, differences became insignificant when controlled by school infrastructure and location, household´s socioeconomic status and household´s social interactions. The results highlight the need for public policies to strengthen school and family resources invested on academic learning to overcome the challenges imposed by the new family configurations on children´s achievement.