The public–private test score gap in Brazil

•School structure is associated to a better overall students’ performance while teachers’ training and experience affects mainly low-performance students.•Public schools’ low performance students would perform even worse with the returns to characteristics from private schools’ students.•Evidence of diminishing returns of the schooling inputs.•Further analysis brings the importance of family background on students’ performance.

This paper presents a counterfactual decomposition of the public–private gap on test scores obtained by 8th graders in Brazil. Quantile regression methods are used to obtain a characterization of the conditional distribution of scores, which is then used to build counterfactuals. The results obtained suggest that low performance students attending public schools would perform even worse with the returns to characteristics from private schools’ students. Further analysis brings the importance of the family background to children's scholar achievement.