Gestão democrática: concepção e efetivação em escolas da rede municipal de Porto Alegre/RS

Abstract

This dissertation intended to analyze the conception and effectuation of the democratic management in municipal schools of the Elementary School in Porto Alegre/RS in 2016. Thus, we present the theoretical conceptions that ground the democratic management. In what follows, we talk about its legal setup and, finally, its social practices. This study performs a qualitative research based on the Historical and Dialectical Materialism as a method for the investigation of reality. We developed two types of research, first, a documental research (by analyzing the legislations that define and regulate the democratic management in schools in federal and municipal scopes between the years of 1988 to 2016); and second, an empirical research (we collected data from three schools defined at random). The interviewed subjects were the representatives of each segment that compounds the school board: teachers, employees, students and their parents, and the director of each school. Based on the realized reflections, we came up with the following results: the democratic management is conceived as a horizontal process enabling the interference of employees and users in the decisions, which makes participation the main management resource. However, its effectiveness is limited by the needs of reproduction of the capitalist way of production. Thus, the insufficiency and/or absence of available resources (human and financial materials) is one of the main challenges in the process of democratization in the education policy.