One of IMDS's strategic actions involves technical support for the preparation, design, formatting, implementation and evaluation of public policies of subnational entities. The way to make this technical support operational is through Technical Cooperation Agreements (TCA) signed between IMDS and the Entities. This is the case of the partnership signed between the institute and the Government of the State of Piauí in April 2024 through the State Planning Secretariat (SEPLAN). The TCA defined, as the first object of study and analysis, an evaluation of the implementation of full-time education for high school.
The process of adopting full-time education in the state high school system began in 2009. By 2022, full-time had been introduced in a set of 96 schools, in a gradual process since its inception. In 2023, reflecting the drive for universalization of the model, 104 schools were converted. In 2024, 152 schools were converted as well. Throughout 2025, the format was completed so that a significant group of students graduated having been submitted to full-time education from the 1st year of High School.
The first stage of the work, carried out from the end of 2024, included the group of students whose schools had full-time implementation until that year. An institutional report of IMDS called "Impact Assessment of Full-Time High School in Piauí" was produced, in which the results of the estimation of the causal effect of this experience on school educational indicators are presented.
The analysis was based, first, on an in-depth study of the components of the full-time school model in the state, through interviews with public managers linked to recent expansion efforts. In the next stage, a longitudinal database was built for the period from 2017 to 2024, in partnership with SEPLAN. The database gathers information on the year of conversion of each school in the state network to the full-time model, learning indicators, such as scores in standardized exams of the state network (Portuguese Language and Mathematics) and school performance indicators, such as abandonment and failure rates.
