Algunas apreciaciones aritméticas sobre el fracaso y el abandono escolar en España

Resum

Introduction: This paper discusses two methodological issues regarding the system of calculating both the school failure and early school dropout rates. The first issue has to do with the convenience to exclude from the reference population those who take part in non-formal educational activities and have not completed the minimum schooling threshold considered in the failure and early school dropout definitions. The second deals with the lower schooling level of newcomers to Spain which, in many cases, is associated with an early school dropout of a foreign educational system and whose inclusion in the study, therefore, might lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the performance of the Spanish educational system. Methodology: We carry out a descriptive statistical analysis of a sample of micro-data from the 2007 (2nd quarter) Spanish Labour Force Survey which consists in recalculating the rates by taking into account the methodological issues mentioned above. Results: Using an alternative methodology which consists in excluding from the reference population those who are involved in non-formal educational activities we find that the school failure rate increases from 12,9 to 14,3% and the early school dropout rate rises from 30,9 up to 34,9%. When the foreign population is excluded from calculations, according to the standard and the alternative methodologies, the rates are, respectively, 9,3 and 11%, in the case of school failure, and 28,1 and 33% for early school dropouts. Conclusions: Two very simple arithmetic adjustments, such as a more adequate treatment of people immersed in non-formal educational activities and the exclusion of the foreign population rate, in order to extract lessons on how the educational system works, might significantly affect the figures of school failure and early school dropout in Spain. While the former issue means an upward adjustment of the rates, the latter drives a relevant decrease of the percentage of people who leave too early the educational system.