Relações e contradições entre a Gestão Escolar Democrática e a Qualidade Total: um estudo a partir das observações realizadas em escolas públicas da rede municipal de Manaus

Abstract

The present work aims at seeking to comprehend the relations and contradictions between the democratic school management and the total quality existing in Manaus city municipal schools. The study took place through critical historic focus, with the use of field research, with a qualitative approach in which it developed, transcribed, and analyzed semi structured interviews with principles, teachers, and parents in four different municipal schools from Manaus city, on the perspective to understand the conceptions of such people regarding democratic school management and the influence by the capitalist system on the systematic management of Brazilian education. With the research it is possible to perform a partial analysis from the acquired data from the interviews and from this one affirm that the principals have demonstrated confusion about the concept of what is democratic school management, relating it to terms that are appropriate to business management. It was possible to also realize that the researched school principals do not have autonomy what concerns their own financial, administration, and academic organization, and they have a dependence of the Education Municipal Secretariat. It was also evident that the adopted practices by the principles are always based on a power relation. What concerns the teachers’ conception, there is always a relation of subordination to guidelines that are established by the school system. Summarizing, it is possible to affirm that although the democratic management experiences seen in this research, are still distant from the ideal, as for instance, a model that considers the decisive participation, dialogue practices and tolerance, discussions on such different practices are important as an attempt to consolidate democratic school management, which truly takes in consideration ideas plurality, values, behaviors that are inherent to a social organization, thereby causing the need of new researches on the topic in matter.