This paper examines how individuals make choices in their daily lives. The case in point is the children at primary schools in rural Lao PDR, many of whom often drop out of school pushing down the overall graduation rate. How to secure the basic needs for the family has often been held to be the main reason for children (and their parents, for that matter) to forgo the choice of continuing schooling. However, it is found that many of the children choose to leave school because the choice of staying on often doesn’t meet their “schooling” needs that schools are supposed to offer. Primary school dropout has been a persistent problem for Laos (low survival rate to grade 5 slightly over 50% for more than the past 10 years). This problem is particularly critical in rural areas where the majority of population is still living near the subsistence level. Unstable income from farm works sometime drives them (and their family members) to migrate to different places like Vientiane and some cities in Thailand. However, that is only a part of the whole “drop-out” problem. To address the problem, narrowly defined as a low graduation rate, in 2009 Progressive Promotion Policy (PPP) was introduced to allow students to proceed to higher grades without final exam. The idea was that PPP would lure the children to stay at school until their graduation and to encourage the students to return to school when they are not occupied without the need to repeat the class. PPP, however, overlooked one serious problem: graduation alone is not strong enough as an incentive for the children to stay in school. Moreover, the absence of remedial classes and other means to prepare the returned children place these children in difficult positions where they have to struggle in keeping up with the classes and in picking up the contents of the classes. A net result is the increase in dropout and the decline in the graduation rate. Keywords: Dropout, Laos, Primary Education, Progressive Promotion, Choice Making
