The city of São Paulo has a vast public education network spread across its extensive territory. However, the city is also the stage for a large scenario of inequality, with the highest incomes in the country occupying the city center while people with high levels of socio-economic vulnerability live in the suburbs.

In this report, I analyzed demographic data of students enrolled in the entire municipal public network, comparing it with the average wages of teachers at each school. The result, although not surprising, is still shocking: schools in the poorest areas of the city, with the highest proportion of black students, also have teachers with considerably lower wages. This scenario is alarming because the municipal education network theoretically has wage equity, meaning all teachers receive the same value, regardless of where they work. However, some practical details end up distorting this principle.

The report received extensive media coverage, including a feature on SPTV (the local news TV show with the highest viewership in the state) and on Folha de São Paulo (one of the largest newspapers in the country).

In this study, me and my co-authors have conducted a comprehensive analysis of 265 transparency compliance evaluations conducted by NGOs, academics, and government oversight authorities across Latin America between 2003 and 2018. Our study sheds light on the compliance of Latin American governments with their own transparency statutes. We found that compliance has modestly improved over time, but there is still a significant lack of compliance with passive transparency at the local level compared to the national level. Additionally, our data shows that evaluations done by government oversight agencies tend to obtain higher scores.

Furthermore, our study highlights significant gaps in evaluation efforts, particularly in the evaluation of passive transparency. Our study is the first large-scale cross-national assessment of transparency compliance in Latin America and was only possible after intense work on data collection and standardization that allowed us to perform data analysis and visualization on this database.

In my master’s thesis, I meticulously investigated three distinct forms of transparency and their corresponding levels of government adherence to these policies at the municipal level. The primary objective was to assess the influence of transparency on public administration outcomes, with a specific focus on the impact of varying transparency types on municipal-level public education in Brazil.

To accomplish this, I initially employed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to quantify the efficiency of education expenditures. This required the careful acquisition, cleaning, and processing of multiple sets of public administration databases for over 5,500 Brazilian municipalities. Next, I conducted a Propensity Score Matching analysis to evaluate the effect of transparency on education, utilizing the Brazilian National Index of Primary Education (IDEB) as a metric.