Covid-19 pandemic impacts on basic education: the issue of school failure

Abstract

The first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which included 2020 and 2021, were the most difficult and challenging for society as a whole, which includes school education, which began operating under the regime of emergency remote teaching, whose classes, mediated by technological resources, could be taught live or made available to students. Another measure adopted by government concerns the automatic progression system, with the purpose of preventing school dropout and student retention due to poor academic performance in studies. Thus, with the objective of understanding the impacts of the pandemic on the production of school failure in basic education in Brazil, a documentary research was carried out at Inep, focusing on the evaluation results of basic education, covering the period from 2018 to 2021 , that is, the first two years of the pandemic, and two years before, for comparison with the pandemic reality. To complement some information, other documentary sources, in addition to Inep, were also consulted, such as Unicef and CNE. The survey data are not always clear enough, but an articulated analysis of the various sources reveals substantial impacts of the pandemic on basic education. Finally, even if the indicators of school failure, such as failure, abandonment and age-grade are not quantitatively defined in a reliable way, Inep and the other consulted organizations point to immeasurable impacts on education, which requires urgent planning, action and public policies to reverse the situation.