Grade Repetition and Primary School Dropout in Uganda

Headnote

Research on education in low-income countries rarely focuses on grade repetition. When addressed, repetition is typically presented along with early school dropout as the "wasting" of educational resources. Simplifying grade repetition in this way often fails to recognize significant methodological concerns and also overlooks the unique insight that can be gained by focusing on repetition. In this article, Sarah Kabay uses mixed methods research to investigate repetition and its association with later school dropout in Ugandan primary schools. In a representative sample of pupib from 136 schoob, Kabay finds that in spite of a policy of automatic promotion meant to limit repetition, 88 percent of pupils had repeated a grade and 11 percent had repeated three or more times. Kabay identifies age as a confounding variable for the association between repetition and dropout, and argues that attention should be drawn to the age of entry into schooling and language policy.

Keywords: primary education, grade repetition, Uganda, educational policy, dropout

Grade repetition, the practice of enrolling a child in the same grade for more than one year, is an issue facing education policy makers and practitioners around the world. Yet, in spite of its ubiquity, repetition is rarely the focus of research on education in low-income countries (Taniguchi, 2015). As articulated by an International Institute for Educational Planning (1999) forum, "Repetition is not one of those glamorous topics of educational planning" (P-2).

Grade repetition is an important and pressing educational issue that should be the subject of more focused research. The way in which repetition is currently discussed in the literature both limits our understanding of the issue and undermines its significance. When addressed, grade repetition is typically coupled with early school leaving (UNESCO, 1998, 2012). This relationship is often interpreted causally: repeating a grade increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, and education systems with high rates of rep- etition will also have high rates of dropout (Bernard, Simon, & Vianou, 2005; Mingat, 2002).

Additionally, both grade repetition and school dropout are frequently used as indicators of general inefficiency, or the wasting of educational resources- as in "[an] operational definition of school wastage refers to pupils who do not complete their schooling in the prescribed number of years either because...