Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 21 Issue 5

School Grade Repetition in Brazil: History of the Configuration of a Political and Educational Problem Abstract I. I ntroduction - This article intends to argue that the movement of students through the Brazilian mandatory school only acquires signs of a n educational political problem from the 1930’s on. It indicates that the current sense of the notion of student failure came to be defined only in the twentieth century, although it was possible to fail students since before. It intends to show further that, in articulation with political and cultural changes in education – such as the emergence of compulsory school, the definition of grade-based model of school, and the primacy of homogeneity of classes – the emergence of better and systematic statistics after 1931 contributed decisively in defining the conditions for the possibility of inclusion of student failure as a problem on the political agenda. Keywords: history of education, educational statistics, school performance, educational policy, student achievement. n the second half of the twentieth century, grade repetition Interested in understanding the processes of social discrimination within the school and committed to criticism of the role assumed by school psychology in legitimizing this discriminatory process, Maria Helena de Souza Patto defended in 1987 the thesis that resulted in emerged in educational debates and on the public agenda as a serious problem of the Brazilian s ch ool, one of great proportions and which needs to be denounced, understood and resolved. Otaíza Romanelli (1978), when examining school statistics between 1930 and 1971, indicated that the expansion of the school in this period showed “insufficient supply”, “low internal performance” and remarkable “social discrimination”. This stemmed from the realization that enrollment growth was significant in those decades, but did not offer vacancies to all school- age children; of the students enrolled in the first grade of primary education, few graduated to the following grades, dropping out of the school along the way; and school failure and dropout rates were higher among students from the popular strata. 1 This article is the result of a cross-institutional project (UFRGS, UNICAMP, USP “A escola obrigatória e seus alunos: acesso, permanência e desempenhos” (1870-1970)", funded by CNPq/Brazil (Case No. 454937/2014-8). A version of this article was published in Portuguese in the Revista Brasileira de Educação (2018). 2 As will be discussed later in this paper, school failure is the result of poor student performance in school evaluations reported at the end of a cycle, which may be annual or not, and repetition refers to the grade or step repetition phenomenon at which the student failed. the book The production of school failure , which is in keeping with these analyses. In her research, the author claimed that poor school performance of poor children was generated by selective mechanisms internal to the institutional dynamics and was not due to students' cognitive deficiencies, or to any deficit or cultural difference. Patto (1993, p.346) also pointed out that the research allowed us to understand that “the failure of elementary school is managed by a scientific discourse that, hiding in its competence, naturalizes this failure in the eyes of all those involved in the process”. The presence of more detailed statistics on school failure and dropout and the educational debate that presented the issue as a serious distortion of the Brazilian school led to some political actions aimed at presenting solutions. Thus, different initiatives were proposed, such as the basic cycle, acceleration classes and school reinforcement classes. Márcia Jacomini (2010, p.22) mentions that Although the discussion about annual non-failure policies has taken place in Brazil since the 1920s, it was not until the 1960s that some municipal and state public education networks organized the teaching in a non-serial way and adopted annual non-failure policies. The author adds that, “in general, proposals for the organization of teaching in cycles have arisen from the need to find alternatives to face the high rates of school failure and dropout and to construct a less selective and excluding school” (Jacomini, 2010, p. .22). It must be admitted, however, that student failure has occurred since long before. From the installation of modern school in Brazil, still in the colonial period, students are expected to undergo exams, in which they can pass or fail. The notion of repetition itself, however, could only arise when the grade school is established at the end of the nineteenth century. It is from the existence of the physical separation of students according to the grades indicated in the curricula, alongside the adoption of simultaneous teaching, that it became necessary that, at the end of a school year, those who did not present learning corresponding to the minimum expected, in terms of mastery of the program of the grade attended, would resume it from the beginning the following year. That is, to repeat the same grade. Therefore, events such as the existence of students who did not learn the contents provided in the program at the expected pace, the fact that they I Volume XXI Issue V Version I 43 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 C © 2021 Global Journals Author: Professor and researcher at University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). e-mail: natalia.gil@ufrgs.br 1 Natália Gil 2