Avaliação externa como estratégia de gestão dos processos educacionais: uma análise de políticas municipais no Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The goal of this research is to identify the cities belonging to the State of Rio Grande do Sul which have instituted the self-assessment methods as an external feature on the perspective of students' proficiency, aiming the analysis on assessment methods as diagnosing instruments for local educational management. This is in order to understand the spiral movement of external assessment, local and nationwide, and how the prior has been displacing educational practices, installing different arrangements of educational management. The general objective of the research is to identify and analyze the institutionalization of assessment methods and its effects on the management of primary education . In order to do so, it was necessary to identify the cities which have instituted external self-assessment methods, then get to know their means, analyze data from IDEB disclosed by INEP , understand how cities have organized the management procedures according to educational quality, think over the role played by the nation state concerning the educational assessment methods as a possibility of regulatory policy, point out the recurrences and singularities presented by the cities which have been analyzed and the possibilities of regulation concepts approach, multi-regulation and counter-regulation. The research establishes its theoretical foundation based on the education policy, assessment and educational management, raising the following question: how are assessment methods installed in the cities of Rio Grande do Sul, and how do they establish the procedures of educational management, regarding the scientific knowledge and political activity? Through the processes of reflection and analysis, a qualitative research has been conducted to fully understand each detail of the subject and its contexts. This approach allowed to track, acknowledge, raise other issues and produce new knowledge. Thereafter, the dialectical perspective has contributed to the understanding that this study implies internal and external contradictions which determine the course of objects and phenomena. The empirical approach has involved the initial research to UNCME-RS, legal documents, pedagogic-didactic documents, interviews, and summaries of INEP's reports on the cities themselves. The approach comprises Stephen Ball's policy cycle, that is, the context of influence, the context of policy-text producing, the context of practice, and contexts of outcomes and policy strategy. The study reveals only 7 out of 497 cities have actually developed some sort of assessment at municipal schools, in which 4 of them have organized an assessment method aiming to students' proficiency (such as exams) according to data gathered for the research. It also shows that 2 out of 4 of the cities involved somehow have institutionalized their assessment methods. The study aligns with the understanding of such methods as educational management devices. The activity of these cities on the educational management field can be noticed by education quality indicators towards school formative investments, performance, success and failure. Furthermore, it presents regulation forms deeply rooted at different levels and contexts, defining the cultural circuit of assessment and local management. Accordingly, the study has granted the visibility of gaps which allow strategies of counter-regulation, feeding the analyzed cities' autonomy before macro-level policies of education on the quality at hand.