Dirigentes municipais de educação: modos de regulação dos sistemas educacionais e subjetividades.

Abstract

This thesis analyzes constituent elements of subjectivities of municipal school boards and seeks to understand how such subjectivities shape and are shaped by reasoning expressed in actions. The hypothesis being examined considers that new ways of regulating education systems, by establishing articulated and coordinated forms of action between diverse and unequal actors, engender collective subjectivities with different levels of centring. The dissemination of rationality standards and values in the management of public services, such as those disseminated by the principles of the New Public Management, is the unifying rationale of the actions. The research aims to investigate, in the narratives of the municipal school boards about their own performance, the constituent processes of their subjectivities in the face of new modes of regulation of education systems, and in the values, ideas and individually expressed choices, the diversity and uniqueness of these subjectivities. The objective is also to analyze writings that bear a set of prescriptive knowledge disseminated by the entity that brings them together. To achieve these objectives, we organized field work from the selection of two municipal school boards from each of the 12 mesoregions of the State of Minas Gerais, totaling 24 municipalities of differing population sizes. Once the research subjects had been defined, interviews were conducted in loco from a semi-structured itinerary. In addition to the research corpus, the work involved the construction of a documentary corpus, composed of promotional materials from the municipal departments of education that were visited, as well as photographic records of these locations and the training materials produced by the National Union of Municipal Directors of Education (Undime). After the transcription of the interviews, all the material was subjected to the procedures of discourse analysis. As part of the theoretical and methodological approach, a bibliographic study was conducted, focused on three areas: municipal school boards in Brazil, ways of regulating education systems, and the relationship between subjectivities and education. The theoretical reference points that guided the research are formed around the concepts of modes of education system regulation, based on the French political sociology of public action, and around subjectivity, considered in its sociological and political philosophical dimensions. Among the research findings, we highlight the dissemination of management by results, the local dynamics of multi-actor management via partnerships, the absence of figures relating to the decision-making autonomy of the board members in small towns, and the hybridization of management practices arising from various types of reasoning for action. The study concluded that the subjectivity of a school board is formed by the confluence of two juxtaposed dimensions, a collective one (we) and an individual one (I), but marked by tensions and contradictions. We defend the thesis that different modes of education system regulation, in fact, give rise to subjectivities that have as substrata new standards of both rationality and values in the management of public education services.