The improvement of quality in education has been discussed for a long time in the educational political scene. The specialized literature has discussed the obstacles for the progress in this area, and the governments have implemented as well a range of educational policies in order to offer conditions and possibilities to give the students equal opportunities in accessing good educational levels. Thus a great challenge to the researchers is to understand the relations between the educational policies and the educational index, and to discover how these policies can contribute to the improvement of quality in Brazilian education. According to this perspective, this study investigates the relation between the educational policies and the quality indicators of the Elementary School in the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro, from 2005 to 2007. At first, the study introduces the sociodemographic description of the cities, considering three social indicators - Municipal Human Development Index (M-HDI), Child Development Index (CDI), and Gini Coefficient -, which allow the contextualization and comprehension on the quality of the given education. In addition to it, this study evaluates the evolution of three indicators - approval rating, school performance, and Brazilian Education Quality Index (IDEB) - in the public schools in Rio de Janeiro state. After that, it presents a mapping about the education in the cities in Rio de Janeiro considering the Articulated Actions Plan (PAR) and focusing on the municipal necessities in different educational areas. Finally, by the use of multivariate analysis and linear regression, the study evaluates how the differences in the performance ratings achieved in Mathematics considering the fifth grade of the Elementary School can be explained according to the educational policies applied in the cities. The results of this study indicate a sensitive and systematic improvement in the educational indexes which were analyzed. They also show that the policies related to the application of FUNDEB’s resources, to teachers professional development, and to the schools spaces physical conditions affect the students performances. In this way, formulations of educational policies based on empirical evidences are discussed.