The culture of grade retention in schools organized in cycles

ABSTRACT Grade retention is present in Brazilian education since its expansion, interfering in the schooling trajectory and in the quality of education. Though actions have been taken to face the problem, the rates of grade retention and dropout persist, portraying the continuation of a pedagogy of retention. This work investigated educators’ beliefs on grade retention and their relationship with evaluation practices in elementary public school from the municipal system of Contagem-MG, Brazil, as well as the variation among those schools. Through a multilevel logistic regression model, two schools were defined for a comparative research with observations and interviews with educators. The results show that, sometimes, certain evaluation decisions distance from pedagogical knowledge influenced by the belief that students’ retention can favor learning, besides working as a tool of coercion and justice.