Gestão escolar sob pressão: políticas de accountability nas escolas públicas de Fortaleza

Abstract

In the first decades of the 21st century, the advancement of results-based management in Brazil – and, more specifically, within the municipal school system of the capital of Ceará – has reconfigured school management practices, subordinating them to performance goals and indicators, intensifying control mechanisms, and redefining the role of public schools and school management. These transformations are linked to a broader process of the diffusion of managerial rationality and the consolidation of the Managerial-Evaluative State, which introduces into education principles associated with efficiency, meritocracy, and accountability. The research problem is guided by the following question: how do accountability policies exert pressure on school management in public schools in Fortaleza, mobilizing results-based regulatory mechanisms and reconfiguring their practices? The study is grounded in the premise that such policies, by subordinating the actions of school administrators to goals and external assessments, produce a reconfiguration of school management practices marked by intensified control, tensions surrounding autonomy, and conflicts between performative logic and the principles of democratic management. Therefore, the general objective of the study is to analyze how accountability policies exert pressure on school management in public schools in Fortaleza, mobilizing results-based regulatory mechanisms and reconfiguring their practices. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach grounded in critical perspectives on educational policy, accountability, and democratic management. The research is guided by historical-dialectical materialism as its theoretical-methodological framework, and the procedures include documentary analysis of the legal and regulatory frameworks structuring educational policy in the municipality of Fortaleza, as well as semi-structured interviews with school administrators from three municipal public schools, whose data were qualitatively analyzed through categories such as results-based regulation, performativity, and autonomy. The findings indicate that school management is strained by the logic of performativity, the loss of autonomy, and the conflict between managerial logic and the principles of democratic management, while also revealing the intensification of control mechanisms and the centrality of external assessments in organizing everyday school life. The findings further show that school management operates as a space for the translation and mediation of accountability policies, while simultaneously confronting structural limitations and contradictions.