States are increasing the number of subjects students can fail without losing the grade

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A GLOBO survey of 23 states shows that only four (Paraná, Espírito Santo, Sergipe and Tocantins) do not adopt this strategy. However, most of them set the possibility of failing in only two or three subjects to progress in the year — a level considered adequate by analysts surveyed by GLOBO, who rate up to four, at most, as a reasonable number.

Those who have implemented this measure since 2023 have increased the level to five or six subjects. The exception is Santa Catarina, which has not adopted the model and has defined that students will be able, from 2026, to fail up to four subjects. Governments claim that this measure was implemented to prevent school dropouts, as failure tends to lead to dropping out of school.

“The partial progression regime has become an educational necessity at the national level, with states across the country revising and adopting its standards, especially after debates on the impacts of the pandemic on learning,” the state of Paraíba, which regulates this measure, said in a statement.

Studies indicate that a very high repetition rate constitutes an ineffective educational practice, which leads to school dropout. Successful systems around the world, for example, only retain students in exceptional cases. However, experts say that postponing many materials to the next year makes it difficult to actually recover the content.

The president of the Instituto Equidade.Info, Cláudia Costin, points out that strategy, without the appropriate structure, can compromise learning and generate artificial results in educational indices. She points out that most Brazilian states still have high school that is essentially part-time, with only five hours a day and an extensive curriculum – leading to a lack of time for the school to work on the other six subjects from the previous year.

— In Rio, for example, we are talking about 13 subjects and one part-time school. How will this student, while not at school, retrieve the content? — he asks. — It is important to guarantee learning. Simply moving the child or adolescent forward will not solve the problem.

Thanks to this measure, the State of Pará managed to reduce the repetition rate from 11%, in 2022, to 0.7% the following year. As it is one of the variables taken into account in the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB), the network ended up moving from penultimate place in the state ranking to sixth. The state’s learning jump, the other Ideb variable, was much more modest. Between 2021 and 2023, it increased from 5.41 to 5.69 in the standardized average, which includes the Portuguese and mathematics assessments.

According to Mônica Ribeiro, professor at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), facilitating approval without resolving structural deficiencies can create an illusion of educational success.

— This ends up giving the impression of having completed their secondary education, but in profoundly unequal conditions — warns Ribeiro, coordinator of the High School Observatory.

In Brazil, the first two states that managed to reach the approval level of more than 90% were Goiás and Pernambuco. Both reached this milestone in 2017. Both have partial progression systems, but with a limit of two and three subjects respectively.

According to Olavo Nogueira Filho, executive director of Todos Pela Educação, both have achieved these objectives by implementing, for many years, public policies aimed at learning, which, according to him, does not seem to be the center of interest of Rio and Bahia, “which resort to mechanisms to artificially inflate the Ideb”.

— In Pernambuco, there was a combination of an excellent full-time teaching model, extensive training for teachers, and a focus on strengthening school management. In Goiás the essence is similar. They took great care to prepare the “beans and rice” very well, with a well-defined curriculum, teaching materials aligned with the curriculum, teacher training and a focus on school management — he said.