Métricas educacionais e as dimensões técnica e sociopolítica de instrumentos de políticas públicas

Abstract

This thesis focuses on specific public policy instruments: population censuses and school censuses. The general objective is to investigate the construction of educational metrics, through the production of data and indicators resulting from these instruments. This thesis also investigates how different metrics are related to changes in the administrative power of the country. The political sociology of public action configures the analytical framework of approach, and the literature review, in relation to population and school censuses, indicating this framework of analysis as deriving from the intersection of the fields of knowledge of political sociology, statistics, demography, social history, and education. Such argument considers that the organization of educational and school data constitute public policy instruments which in turn become technical and sociopolitical devices articulating the relations between administrative power (governments) and the administered (governed). This study is organized in four chapters. To begin, the introduction summarizes the trajectory and processes of this investigation with the description of the object and the objectives, and presents the reasons that led to the choices adopted in this thesis. The introduction is followed by a chapter that synthesizes the analytical framework of the research, based on the French neo-institutionalist approach. It considers public policies as collective capacities regulating societies, mediated by different and socially widespread knowledge and by actors in both governments and society. The subsequent chapter conducts a retrospective study of the development of the instruments that enabled population censuses in Brazil in the colonial and imperial era. The objective is to demonstrate how, historically, the first metrics were constructed and how they provided knowledge about the population and the educational situation. The third chapter investigates the intersections between the instruments used to collect data on school education in Brazil. In this chapter were analyzed the administrative records produced by the provinces between the years 1834 and 1889 and the educational data collected by the population censuses of 1890, 1900, 1910 and 1920. The chapter evidences the creation of the first lists of educational data and the statistics derived from them, as well as the elaboration of the first indicators concerning the progress of school education. The fourth chapter analyzes the instruments used exclusively for collecting school and educational data in the period of the First Republic (1889 to 1930). The objective is to demonstrate how different metrics influenced the initial development of School Censuses in Brazil and the differences and associations established between school statistics (data originating from administrative records and School Censuses) and educational statistics (product of demographic censuses). Finally, this thesis concludes that different metrics are the result of public action in historically situated moments and that the changes they experienced over time establish the production of educational data and indicators as a component of measuring the country's progress.