Managerialism in the Continuing Education of Teachers in Brazil: An Analysis of Documents Proposed by the National Council of Education Secretaries

Abstract

The influence of the National Council of Education Secretaries (CONSED) is recognized in the processes of implementing public policies for continuing teacher education in Brazil, as well as its role in the articulation of operational logistics and its approximation with third-sector institutions, which tends to influence the guidelines for training processes. Given the above, this work asks the following research question: what are the characteristics proposed for the continuing education of teachers in the context of implementing the National Common Core Curriculum Base (BNCC) and the New High School (NEM)? For this purpose, we analyse documents made available on the site of CONSED, organized by the Working Group (GT) Continuing Education. To that end, we used the Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) proposed by Moraes (2003). As a result, categories associated with guidelines for continuing teacher education processes emerged: alignment with US educational policies; governance; and assessments, control, and monitoring. These categories highlight aspects such as: the need to rethink a discourse of “efficacy” of continuing teacher education conducted in the US; the governance as a principle that involves institutions of the so-called third sector aligned with the managerial proposal of public administration; assessment as an instrument for monitoring and controlling what is taught in schools. We concluded that managerial principles are strongly present in the analyzed documents and, therefore, as a characteristic of the continuing teacher education processes for implementing the BNCC and the NEM.