Rio Governor Cláudio Castro signed a decree so that all 515,000 public school students can pass the year even if they fail in a maximum of six subjects if they are in the first and second years of high school, or in a maximum of three if they are in the third. The objective of the new progression policy is to reduce dropout rates, by motivating students to recover unlearned content without compromising obtaining their diploma. But it seems clear that a student with six outstanding subjects, or about half the grade, will not be able to learn everything he has not learned and, moreover, absorb new content.
- Change: High school students in the Rio State network will pass the year if they fail in up to six subjects
In the first year of high school, dropout rates in 2022 reached 10%, compared to a national average of 6.5%, according to the Anísio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (Inep), linked to the MEC. It is even possible that the index will improve with the new policy. But what’s the point if students don’t get good training? Rejection cannot be a rule, but there must be limits. The continuous progression system must be conditioned on the number of subjects and the conditions allowing the student to learn the remarkable content. Six is an excessive number, in the opinion of Cláudia Costin, president of the Instituto Equidade.Info, linked to Stanford University, and former global director of education at the World Bank.
Educational networks that use continuous progression must guarantee that, the following year, the student will have all the educational reinforcement necessary to recover the content that he did not learn the previous year. “Allowing students with low grades in six subjects to pass makes this job much more difficult the following year,” says a report from the Todos Pela Educação movement.
- State: Experts and students criticize the measure that allows people to pass the year even if they fail in six subjects in the public education network
According to the latest available data, referring to 2023, Rio obtained a score of 3.3 in the Basic Education Development Index (Ideb). It is the penultimate in the country, but better than Rio Grande do Norte. As Ideb is calculated based on approval rates and students’ grades in the Basic Education Assessment System (Saeb), the new “automatic approval” policy is expected to have a positive impact on Rio’s grades.
But without educational progress. “They are not structurally faced with the problem of escape,” says the general coordinator of the Rio State Educational Forum, Waldeck Carneiro. “There was no dialogue with schools and the National Education Council was not consulted on this measure, which interferes with the daily life of the school and poses problems of design and method. This is not a cult of repetition. What cannot be denied to students is the right to knowledge.”
We must do everything possible to keep students in school, but we must not forget that the main objective remains the same: that they learn.