Gestão, qualidade e premiação: o prêmio Nacional de Referência em Gestão Escolar numa escola pública municipal

Abstract

This thesis discusses the education reform in the period between 1990’s and the first decade of the new century, which can be characterized as a reform strongly influenced by international agencies. This reform has been restructuring educational system, including policies of enrollment expansion and diversification of education, in order to improve school achievement, teaching, and learning quality. In that context, school and educational management have been evoked for a new school assessment culture, understood as a strong capacity of inducting education quality, based on an educational managerialism, performative and meritocratic, and promoting accountability and self-administration for controlling high stakes and standardized outcomes. Productivity in schools, imposition of priorities, and the homogenization of school practices have substantially threaten the assumptions and the experiments of democratic governance in education. This study researches the National School Management Award related to public education policies, understanding this prize as a device operating for cultural and material school changes. This research, as a qualitative study, analyzes documents – award guidelines for participating, school dossier and proposal – and interviews with teachers and staff. The prize is thought to forge consensus, adherence, and commitment with accountability goals, in order to constitute new actors with new roles to implement educational policies decided in global and national scales. The documental analysis of the Award guidelines and the study of the context in the school – interviews – indicated that the prize, as a discursive device, promotes a regulation of the practices and the schoolwork, corroborating with managerial modes of governance at local levels.