School retention rates in portuguese municipalities: a comparative analysis

Abstract

One of the measures used to evaluate the success of an education system is the retention rate. In Portugal, in spite of the progress achieved in the past decades, students’ retention is still a problem. The phenomenon of school failure has been extensively studied throughout the world. Nevertheless, the way it is distributed across the country and the potential reasons that contribute to it being more intense in some areas than in others have not. The idea behind this project is to analyze the retention rates in middle school and in high school in the Portuguese public system, since the beginning of the decade and understand how they are distributed across the territory. The methods used were Principal Components Analysis and cluster analysis. The data related to potentially explanatory indicators of student failure – such as the average number of students per class, percentage of students in families who benefit from social support and the percentage of teachers with a permanent contract – were analyzed. The differences between the north and the south of the country are remarkable. Generally, the retention rates are much higher in the south than in the north. We also conclude that municipalities that are closer to each other have similar behaviors regarding their students’ success or unsuccess in terms of retention rates. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, in Algarve, São Brás de Alportel stands out as a municipality that does particularly well in a context where retention rates are relatively high. Lastly, in this dissertation, we zoomed in the conurbations of Lisboa and Porto, where almost one in four children was enrolled in 2015/2016. The conclusions are striking: there are schools with some of the lowest retention rates while others, sometimes right across the street, can double the percentage of retained students.