ABSTRACT
The present article intends to propose the argumentation that the movement of students by Brazilian mandatory school only acquires signs of educational political problem from the 1930’s on. It indicates that the current sense of the notion of student failure is defined only in the XX century, although it was possible to fail students since before. It intends to show further that, in articulation with political and cultural changes in education - as the statement of the compulsory school, the definition of school grades model and the primacy of the homogeneity of classes - the existence of better statistics and systematic ones after 1931 decisively contributed in defining the conditions for the possibility of inclusion, on the political agenda, of student failure as a problem.
KEYWORDS:
history of education; education statistics; school performance; educational politics