Analysis: Romanian schooling system loses tens of thousands of students by graduation

Over 206,000 students started school in Romania in September 2012, but only over 114,000 were registered for the baccalaureate exam in June 2023, twelve years later, representing a major failure for the Romanian education system, according to an analysis piece published on Edupedu.ro.

The analysis begins by noting the importance of the National Evaluation, introduced as a pilot project in the spring of 2013. Correlations made with data from second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grades throughout the entire education of a generation of students showed that tens of thousands of students lose or fail to retain the competencies acquired in primary education during middle school, according to data from the Ministry of Education analyzed by Edupedu.ro.

In the 2011-2012 school year, 206,055 children were enrolled in first grade, the first grade of primary education at that time, and 174,473 completed the eighth grade, according to the Report on the State of Pre-University Education in Romania 2019-2020. The Ministry of Education notes in official reports that 12.2% of children in this cohort dropped out of school during primary and middle school. This means over 25,000 students, which is equivalent to 1,000 classes of 25 students each.

The remaining students took the National Evaluation for the eighth grade in the summer of 2019, and according to the document on the Ministry of Education's website, 6,379 (3.1%) students failed. Together with the 25,202 (12.2%) children who dropped out of school, these figures represent "losses" for the ministry.

Official data show that the biggest problem is in rural areas because in these schools, from this cohort, 18.9% dropped out and were considered "lost," including repeaters, accounting for 23.1%.

The analysis by Edupedu.ro also highlights that there have been 16 education ministers in the same period of 12 years.

After the National Evaluation for the eighth grade, an official report from the National Center for Evaluation and Examination (CNEE) highlighted the decline in mathematics performance for this generation during middle school. Over 18,000 students who were good at mathematics in fourth grade in 2015 experienced a decline during middle school and scored below 5 in the National Evaluation at the end of eighth grade in 2019, as stated in the "Report on the Results of the National Evaluation for Mathematics and Science in the Sixth Grade."

The report indicates exactly where the decline occurred: "For students who correctly solved over 50% of the items in the National Evaluation for the fourth grade in 2015 but obtained an average below 5 in the National Evaluation for the eighth grade in 2019 (there were 18,731 students out of the 105,495 in this situation), the decline occurred between the fourth and sixth grades and was not recovered by the end of the eighth grade."