Abstract
The Pisa 2012 report mentioned that Brazil has one of the highest rates of grade retention in the world, which is an expensive process. This study proposes a method for calculating the cost of retention using the Educational Census data to estimate the number of students who repeated a grade in 2012, and the cost per student presented in the National Fund for Basic Education (Fundeb). As showed by other studies, this cost is high, and there is a necessity to create new policies that take grade retention into consideration to distribute educational resources.
Grade repetition; Fundeb; Pisa; School Census