A Psychosocial Approach to Exclusion from School

1. 1. Some Data from the Brazilian Educational System

Brazil has made some improvements in the field of education, such as expansion of the number of schools, increasing the number of students, and decreasing the number who have to repeat an academic year. It does not mean, however, that the educational system is free of concerns. On the contrary, there are many children and adolescents who continue to fail in Brazilian schools. It might be seen through the numbers still repeating one or more school years and abandonment or self-exclusion rates provided by governmental research organs. ¹ The school census of 2000, which refers to the 1999 academic year, shows that the national repetition rate in Compulsory Education ² is 3.6%. This means that around 1.3 million pupils are considered not to have achieved the average level of learning. That is, they are objectively told that they have not shown sufficient engagement and learning results. Besides that, another 1.7 million (4.8%) avoid facing such judgment directly by abandoning school before finishing the academic year.

These data are important not only by themselves, but also for what they represent within the whole system. The census also points out that only 76.5% of Compulsory Education students are aged up to 14, which means that at least 23.5 % are not of the ideal age. This proportion might be higher, as the official data do not show how many out of these 76.5% have not been enrolled in the year considered to be ideal for their age.

However, these national data hide important peculiarities, both regional and local, and the differences between the two levels of Compulsory Education. Some of the Brazilian data also demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between poverty and school performance. In general, poorer regions tend to show lower levels of school success and vice versa. For instance, the poorest regions (North, Northeast, and Center-West) have, on average, 34.5% more students out of the ideal age than the richest (Southeast and South).

Following the same logic, but on smaller scale, the closer the schools are to poorer wards in a city, the more likely their students are to drop out of school. This draws attention to the fact that school problems are multi-determined and are part of a greater and deeper process that can be called social exclusion. What is being said is that these problems demand integrated action that should be run by national as well as local organizationsnot only in the, strictly speaking, educational field, but also in social, political, and economic ones.

That is what has been done on both national and local levels in recent years in Brazil, despite the extreme difficulties caused by being a developing nation and by the diversity of needs in such a vast country.

The new Brazilian Education Law (LDB), which came into force in 1996, has given new means for tackling some of the problems cited above. First, it has assumed diversity and, as a consequence, transferred part of the education system which was under control of the state to the municipalities. Hence, each city or town has taken, progressively, Compulsory Education as its responsibility. Second, the law provides a wide variety of educational resources which can be chosen and applied according to specific necessities. And finally, it integrates some social policies for controlling social exclusion.

As a result of that, the strategies utilised by each system to boost educational performance and encourage students to attend school have been widely different. They vary from altering the staff configuration (creating new functions, such as pedagogic coordinators, increasing teachers' continuing professional development) to introducing innovations connected to students (acceleration classes where over-aged students do two academic years in one, a new evaluation system which promotes the students automatically through the four first academic years, and extra lessons during the holidays), or...