Race and gender or class alone do not explain student performance – 05/23/2023 – Policies and Justice

In 1960, Clarice Lispector and Carolina Maria de Jesus —writers who already had their books published by the same publisher— posed for a historic photo. Decades later, Benjamin Moser, Clarice’s biographer, used the portrait and described Carolina as “a black woman who writes” and who looked like “Clarice’s maid”. One cannot look at this situation only from the spectrum of race: it is also necessary to recognize other social identifiers, such as gender and social class of the two, to understand this difference in treatment.

We call intersectionality the concept according to which the interaction between two or more social factors defines a person. The term, coined by the North American Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, demonstrates that the intersection between different social identities makes discrimination assume unique characteristics.

It is no different when we look at Brazilian education: there are nuances that we need to understand when studying students’ academic performance. After all, they are not just your race, color, gender, social class or region of origin, but a combination of all these identities and more. Recognizing that our students have complex identities, which can make them vulnerable to various forms of prejudice, allows us to more accurately analyze which students are most vulnerable and need a focused public policy eye.

It is well established in the literature that the results of public school students vary according to each of the mentioned factors, but Brazilian studies generally disregard the intersectional impact. In my master’s thesis, defended in 2022 at Stanford University, I questioned how the academic performance of this group in Brazil varies, concomitantly, by race, gender, social class and region of origin.

I found that the five Brazilian macro-regions show a similar pattern of results for the Saeb (Basic Education Assessment System) tests of Portuguese and Mathematics. While in the Portuguese test black boys have the lowest performance, white girls have the best for all social classes. As for the math test, black girls have the worst performance, and white boys the best. Thus, throughout Brazil, being black and poor influences academic performance, in the case of the measure being gender, the performance varies according to the test.

In the regional comparison, there is an essential difference in the averages. Although the regions present a similar pattern of results, the performance of students from the poorest regions, such as the Northeast, is significantly lower even considering socioeconomic class. For example, in the same 2017 Portuguese test, white girls from the Southeast of the lowest social class had similar results to black boys from the highest social class of the Northeast. This leads us to believe that the presence of greater income inequality significantly reduces the performance of students in the poorest regions.

Thus, the data analyzed indicate that black students from the lowest socioeconomic level and from the poorest regions (North and Northeast) are more penalized in terms of educational results. The intersectional approach allows us to understand, more accurately, the role that social structures play in the reproduction of discrimination, and also allows us to design focused and efficient strategies to leverage the power of our students.

The editor, Michael França, asks that each participant of the space “Politics and Justice”, of the Sheet, suggest a song to the readers. In this text, the one chosen by Lara Vilela was “LadoAlado” by Josyara and Margareth Menezes.

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