The quantification of quality: Some considerations on the school failure rates in Brazil

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the relations, observable in the Brazilian case, between school failure rates and the measurement of quality of teaching. The focus is put on discussions about the possibility of quantifying the quality of teaching as of the 20th century. Initially, the polysemy of the term quality and its implications for the quantification processes is discussed. The analysis of documentation allows to see that, in Brazil, the naturalization of the students’ poor school performance coexisted with criticism of high rates of grade repetition as a mechanism of selectivity and exclusion. The overlapping of school failure rates and the measurement of the quality of teaching is, still today, perceptible in the Brazilian educational context, as it was observed by the analysis of construction of the IDEB (Basic Educational Development Index) that, since 2007, seek to quantify school quality in Brazil. This index comprises not only the measurement of the knowledge acquired by students, considered not to be a sufficient condition to assess teaching quality, but also the occurrence of a standardised school progression, with a low incidence of failure and dropout.