Students in Brazil regress from the 6th to the 9th of elementary school

An analysis based on data from Saeb’s Portuguese and mathematics tests confirms an alarming scenario: student performance regresses between the 6th and 9th year of elementary school, in public schools. In 2021, while 51% of students in the 5th grade showed adequate learning in Portuguese, only 35% of their classmates in the 9th grade left with enough knowledge to enter secondary school. In mathematics, the scenario was even worse. Only 37% of students in the 5th year had adequate learning, a percentage that dropped to 15% in the 9th year. And the data is similar to the 2019 and 2017 scenarios, even before the pandemic.

The drop in performance when moving from the 5th to the 6th year, with a downward curve until the 9th year, demotivates students and ends up becoming one of the main causes of school dropout and the high failure rate in high school. The 2022 school census showed that the first year of high school is the series with the highest rate of school dropout (8.2%), failure rate (12.7%) and migration to teaching young adults (2 .7%).

The panorama is frightening. Using a QEdu survey, with criteria made available by Inep (a body of the Ministry of Education) in 2017 – and, even so, much lower in quality than those used in other countries -, only 15% of 9th grade students had acceptable knowledge in mathematics in 2021 to continue their studies, few of them learning beyond what was expected. In other words, 85% of 9th grade students in 2021 were at a basic level (54%) or insufficient (31%) in mathematics. If students need reinforcement activities at the basic level, those with insufficient levels need to be exposed again to the content taught.

In Portuguese, the 65% of 9th grade students below the appropriate level in 2021 were unable to perform a series of simple text interpretation and writing operations, such as locating explicit information in opinion articles or identifying the purpose of stories and fables. In mathematics, 85% of students who finished 9th grade were not able to convert measurement units of length from meters to centimeters or recognize that angles do not change in figures obtained by enlargement or reduction.

Private schools, at a lower level, also record this drop in performance at the end of the 9th year. In 2019, while 74% of 5th year students showed adequate learning in mathematics, only 56% of their 9th year classmates reached the same level. In Portuguese, these numbers corresponded to 82% and 70%, respectively. In 2021, the results were worse: while 81% of students had adequate knowledge of Portuguese, only 67% of their classmates in 9th achieved the same result. In mathematics, the discrepancy was even greater, 70% and 47%, respectively.

The 2021 Saeb test was held after the pandemic, a period in which public schools remained closed or with distance learning. These circumstances influenced the results, which were lower than those of previous years. Despite this, past editions have a similar context. As the graph below shows, in 2017 and 2019, student learning rates are also very different from those in 5th and 9th grade.

QEdu is a project by Meritt, a company that offers educational platform services, and the Lemann Foundation. The criteria established by the platform were created by professor José Francisco Soares, and adopted by Inep at the time he presided over the institute. For political reasons, after the period the body returned to presenting only data without performance quality attributions.

“Fundamental 2 is a black hole that no one is managing very well.”

“The conclusion of the data is that elementary education is a black hole that no one is taking care of very well”, points out João Batista Oliveira, PhD in education from Florida State University. The expert believes that low performance in secondary education and school dropout rates are the result of problems in grades 6 to 9. However, with effort, school managers have the potential to improve results.

The doctor in education from USP Ocimar Alavarse is surgical in stating that, despite all stages of basic education requiring improvements, elementary education 2 is the phase that requires priority attention, both due to its current situation and the fact that it is strategic for the student’s academic trajectory. For him, although it is possible to see an increase in the grades of public school students in the 9th year in recent years, this progress is slow and far from ideal.

Alavarse explains that one of the main reasons why students have difficulty learning in the final years of elementary school is the set of accumulated deficiencies in the ability to read and interpret texts. Obstacles to understanding other subjects – chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc. – are often a reflection of problems with reading ability.

At the same time, a complicating factor is the fact that teachers do not always learn in college how to deal with this gap among students. Teachers often notice that students cannot understand the texts presented, but the situation is not resolved. “Students end up being exposed to texts, so they have to develop this ability, if there are deficiencies”, he says. For the teacher, if specific activities were carried out to improve reading ability, the results would be better.

The expert believes that a first way to improve teaching in the final years would be to invest in the training of teachers in all primary 2 subjects so that they are capable of meeting these deficiencies, with effective strategies. “It is another deviation to think that the reading problem in the final years can be solved with the Portuguese language teacher. It is a task for all teachers at this stage”, he reiterates.

Low performance is related to school dropout

João Batista Oliveira explains that, in elementary school 2, the school is able to recover the performance lost in the first years. “The improvements made in the final grades, which are few, have no correlation with the level at which students reach the 6th year. What does it means? Which is not a lost cause. In other words, regardless of how students arrive, there are places that can improve the level [de aprendizado]”, he explains.

Responsibility for elementary education 2 is shared by states and municipalities and, for João Batista, none of the spheres has been looking for solutions for this stage. In other words, if there is a proven capacity of educational management to improve learning results, on the other hand there is negligence in this care. The expert reinforces that, as a consequence, students will have a greater tendency to drop out of school or arrive more unprepared for secondary education.

Alavarse follows the same line. “When students finish their final years and go to high school, a real disaster ensues. Because they are at a capacity far below what is necessary to deepen some studies in high school”, he comments.

Data released by the MEC in 2019 shows that 15% of young people between 15 and 17 years old do not enroll in school at the beginning of the school year. In the end, around 30% have stopped attending the educational environment. After the first year of high school, the grades that most frequently drop out are the 2nd year of high school and the 9th year of elementary school.

Meanwhile, changes regarding the new secondary education are about to be discussed in the National Congress. After pressure from unions, the Lula government presented a new bill that changes the current legislation, which tried to be more attractive to young people, even those who reach this stage of basic education less prepared than their colleagues in other countries. If the Lula government’s proposal is not modified and secondary education continues to be uninteresting for young people, school dropout rates are likely to increase, experts warn.