In the educational context, one of the biggest problems that affect the performance of school institutions is what concerns dropouts. This study aims to describe the state of the art of school dropouts. It considered that the decision of students to interrupt their training itinerary brings adverse effects not only for the subject who evades since the magnitude of this problem causes damage to the whole society. The method used was the conceptual bibliographic submitted by Nascimento-e-Silva (2012; 2020), which consists of four phases: a) definition of research questions; b) data collection; c) organization and analysis of data, and; d) generation of responses. The study inferred that among the causes detected in the consulted literature, there are both causes relevant to the personal scope of students who drop out and the causes related to the education system and how education is organized from an institutional point of view. The conclusion shows that the school institutions need to constantly observe what science produces about dropout, to strengthen themselves in terms of managing and controlling the causes that support the phenomenon of dropping out of school.