Representações sociais dos(as) diretores(as) de escola sobre o método de melhoria de resultados (MMR) na gestão escolar

Abstract

This research was mobilized by observing the practice of implementing projects that reduce educational management to managing results, despite democratic management, adequate for the integral formation of students. From the observation of the use of management tools and methodologies in School Units, its general objective was to analyze the social representations of school directors about the Results Improvement Method (MMR) in school management. Supported by the Theory of Social Representations, the research assumed assumptions presented by Moscovici (1961) e Jodelet (1989), since, by privileging symbolic elements in the study of social phenomena, it allows observing how opinions, beliefs and personal values are formed about a social object, as well as the resulting movements. In addition, as sociocognitive constructions, such social representations allow capturing the expression of tacit knowledge, elaborated and shared about a social object by interacting groups, in a dynamic perspective: they can be stable, but also change when situated in a context of contradictions and conflicts, which, if unveiled, become understandable and subject to change. In order to identify the structure of the representational field in which the social representations of school principals about the MMR are inscribed and to recognize the meanings and senses attributed to the MMR, the field research was carried out in two stages: in the first, a questionnaire with a diversified format was applied (containing a Free Association of Words; a justification and an open question) to 77 school directors of a Board of Education in the capital of São Paulo. In the second stage, interviews were conducted with 2 directors and 1 school director, using a semistructured questionnaire, in order to deepen the data produced in the 1st. Stage. As analysis procedures, there was data processing by the software Interface de R pour les Analysis Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires (IRaMuTeQ) to proceed with prototypical and similarity analyses, with depth, through Content Analysis, according to Franco (2008), the production of inferences makes it possible to categorize the content of individual interviews and interpret them. Establishing connections between the educational management models adopted by SEDUC-SP and the local economic, political and cultural contexts over the last few decades, as well as theoretical reflections on school management based on different theoretical references, it was identified that, for the researched group, the MMR is a management tool that organizes, disciplines and controls the school's actions through records. In this sense, the MMR starts to have an image of bureaucratization and control that does not contribute to facing the difficulties and challenges of school management, emptying the meaning of its use. At the same time, the contradictions and conflicts that emerged from the implementation of this model in the management of these schools seem to contribute to the awareness of the actors involved, supporting the change in school management practices experienced for the mediation of educational purposes aimed at social transformation