How does social inequality affect Brazilian students’ performance in science? An inquiry into the Brazilian High School Exam (2012-2019)

Recently, Brazilian students’ low performance in international assessments has reached the news, raising the suspicion that the quality of scientific education in the country is declining. In this article, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of education, we investigate the effect of social inequality on the scientific performance of Brazilian students. A representative sample of ENEM participants between 2012 and 2019 (n = 489,167) was subjected to an adjusted correspondence analysis and inserted in a multivariate linear model. As a first result, we observed that social background explains more than 35% of the students' performance in science. Therefore, school success is largely indebted to class privilege. On the other hand, attending a privileged school is more important than being born in a privileged family, as the school social effect proved to be four times superior to the individual social effect. These results have important implications to critically approach science education regarding the ideology of merit as well as the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities in the education system.