Sistema municipal de ensino: arena de confluências, rupturas e desafios na democratização da educação

Abstract

On the construction of educational public policies both social maintenance and transformation processes are going to suffer direct influences, on one hand, from ideological and political proposals that emanate from power parties and, on the other hand, from organized civil society groups that, in movements that pass by confluences, ruptures and challenges, from time to time are brought together or are drift away on achieving the education purposes. The qualitative approach, based on a research characterized as a case study has, in the Municipal Education System of Santa Rosa/RS, its discussion element. The main objective aims to analyze, from the standpoint of the Policy Cycle, the creation, deployment and consolidation processes of this education system from the democratic management conception present in the current conjuncture of decentralization and democratization proposed on national laws, in a way to notice, in a local context, what happens in a wider context, that is, the reality of Brazilian Municipal Education Systems. From a timeline established between 1997 and 2012, period which three parties and their coalitions have taken turns on the administration of the analyzed city, two groups were invited to take part on this study, being one of them named public policies formulators, which includes municipal managers (mayors), municipal educational managers (municipal education secretariats), and representatives from the Municipal Education Committee (collegiate presidents), who acted in this period, and the other group named participant subjects, constituted by teachers from the municipal education network. The Content Analysis (BARDIN, 2003) is adopted as exploration, treatment and appreciation procedure for the data collected though interviews and open and mixed questionnaires which are approached with the help of Atlas/ti software. As theoretical instill on data interpretation, the Ball and Bowe (1992,1994) approach, named Policy Cycle, was chosen, and it comprehends the study of the influence, text production, practical, results and policy strategy contexts. This approach, as an analytical reference, together with the reflexions based on Paulo Freire, orients the discussion around contexts in which the municipal education policy is planned, created, executed and evaluated with possibilities of redevelopment. The discussions, from various categories that emerge from the policy contexts, enable the comprehension of the subjects and institutions in a way to establish themselves as protagonists of the decision processes and also of the execution, following and evaluation of the actions that aim to qualify the public education. It is possible to notice the Municipal Education System space, even though limited by implications imposed by the neoliberal macrosystem, as the driver of educational policies that can be (re)built in a way to create a permanent exercise of democratization of the own society, because it is in the implementation of participative practices, dialogic and committed to the human emancipation that the Brazilian public education grows strong and its subjects engage in an effective democracy learning.