School bureaucracy and reproduction of stigmas in the students and their families

Abstract

This article analyzes data from research with 23 managers of municipal schools in Rio de Janeiro that investigated the relationship between educational bureaucracy and families during their children's enrollment processes. In the in-depth interviews, we mapped managers’ perceptions of students and their families, partly oriented by individual and collective stigmas. We will describe the typology we proposed to interpret this set of stigmas, the application of the typology in the analysis of the interviews, and argue about the bureaucrats’ actions guided by these stigmas. Our results show that the bureaucratic actions tend to reproduce social inequalities of origin and produce new forms of inequality within schools.