Success and failure in elementary school: A relationship between grade retention, school dropout and proficiency

Abstract

The present work seeks to relate grade retention, school dropout and proficiency in Portuguese and Mathematics, starting from SAEB / 2015, for Elementary School, in an attempt to verify how these relationships occur within the dropout Federation Units and Administrative Dependence (federal, state, municipal and private). The methodological proposal is based on the theoretical contributions of Gomes (1997), updated by Silva et al (2016), to establish a comparison between the grade retention and dropout data with the SAEB results where grade retention and school dropout are presented as axes, allowing better visualization of relationships. The results indicate a reduction in the average grade retention, North and Northeast regions with higher rates of dropout and reproach, high rates of grade retention and school dropout in the state public school system. It is concluded that the relationship is noticeable at the extremes of high failure and dropout with low proficiency, as well as the reverse. The comparative analysis points out that failure and dropout may indicate a drop in proficiency. In summary, there is no evidence that the failing student learns more, as common sense dictates.