In this article we discuss the implementation of the right to education and the form of organization of teaching in the perspective of democratizing it. The assumption here is that the use of cycles and of continued progression can be a way of organizing teaching to help and build an educational process capable of including everyone, and of offering them real conditions for learning. However, if teaching organized in cycles and continued progression is to contribute to fulfill the demands of an universal school, it is necessary that, alongside the breaking away with seriated educational practices, which are fragmented and marred by student failure, there comes the discussion of a conception of education that takes into account the appropriation of culture in a wider sense of the word. This implies a change of paradigm involving the fields of educational theory, politics and practice. This is an important discussion because, although during the last thirty years several educational proposals have questioned student failure, it remains present in the educators' idea of school education. Therefore, in order of overcome school failure it is essential to seek in the fundamentals of a continuous education process the concepts and practices that dissolve the promotion/retention dichotomy. Under this perspective, cycles and continued progression need to be understood as part of a wider educational policy for the construction of the social quality of a school for everyone.
Cycle; Continued progression; Right to education; School failure