Avaliação de impactos das políticas de ciclos sobre o desempenho escolar no Brasil: uma análise em escolas públicas dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental entre os anos de 2011 e 2017

Abstract

Nowadays, the cycle and series systems are the main forms of organizations of Elementary Schools in Brazil. Both systems start from different premises, especially in relation to mecanisms of promotion and evaluation of learning. While the school in series rests on a grade-based asssessment, with promotion or retention at the end of a school year, the cycles are based on continued progression, formative and diagnostic evaluation, considered, in literatue in general, to be a more flexible school organization that seeks to provide all students with learning, according to their needs. It can be said that cycles are policies that emerged in the Brazilian educational scenario in the twentieth century to solve a serious problem caused by the school in series, i.e., school failure, especially in the first grades. The studies on impact assessment that use school performance rates generally indicate that the organization of schooling in cycles increases the promotion rates and reduces dropout rates in Elementary School. Regarding school performance, there is still no consensus, in the literature, on its effects. In that sense, this study aimed at broadening the debate on school organization policies in Brazil with the general objective of assessing the impacts of cycle policies on the average proficiencies in Portuguese and Mathematics of public schools in the early years of Elementary School between 2011 and 2017. In order to achieve this, a quantitative research was performed, using two methods of a quasi-experimental nature. Both methods, namely the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and the Differences in Differences Method (DD) were used in the evaluation of public policy impacts. The former enabled the development of control groups (school in series) more similar to the treatment group (school in cycles) and the latter made it possible to estimate the policy impacts over time. Thus, with data from the School Census and Prova Brasil, made available by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP) for the years 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017, three samples were built for different periods of exposure to the regime. The results showed that, for one year, the cycles had no impact on the performance of schools. For three years of exposure, this regime had positive and significant effects of small magnitude for Portuguese, but had no impact on proficiency in Mathematics. For five years of exposure, the impacts were negative and significant for both school subjects, but also of small magnitude. It means that this regime is not promoting better educational results in relation to schools in series as expected from a type of school organization considered to be more suitable for the primary education, by eliminating annual failure.