This research has the objective of analyze how the participate institutional evaluation can contribute for the social quality of public schools of the elementary degree of education in Campinas, starting from the hypothesis that: is it possible for the public school of elementary degree of education to develop and to implement its own processes of participative institutional education that lead to reflection and action on the education offered to the population that participates in it and to improve the social quality of school education? The research has its origin in the Geres Project -School generation 2005however as an initiative of the Campinas Pole, coordinated by the Laboratory of Observation and Descriptive Studies (LOED) of the Education College of UNICAMP. The LOED proposed to offer the schools that would join the technical and methodological support of the PIE Project through the image of the supporter and/or researcher in direct actions with the schools, whereas not conducting the jobs, but offering guidance so that the schools could implement its own processes of evaluation and self-evaluation by using their Autonomous Evaluation Committee. The research at the beginning was conducted in three city schools of elementary degree of education in Campinas. However, with the abandonment of one of them, the work was developed in all of the project's steps in just two of them. Other sources of data were researched, involving, mainly, one private school and another state one, which objective was to understand why they abandoned the project, because this collection of data enabled the comprehension of the studied phenomenon. For the data collection, were used the participative observation, questionnaires and interviews. The collected data were registered in the researcher's field diary. The utilization of the analytic-descriptive method provided a preview of totality of the research, showing the paths that had already been crossed, the challenges and results. As a theoretical reference we bring to discussion the Brazilian education reality, one look over the institutional evaluation in Brazil and the assumptions of the participative institutional evaluation, fundamental concepts so that the institutional evaluation becomes an option that helps to transform the school's routine. Regarding the possibilities and limits of the participative institutional evaluation in public schools of elementary degree, the facts are that there are some decisive factors to its implementation. We outline the job of the school's management, of the public power, promoting objective conditions of effective participation of the teacher and all of the school community that can mainly influence the continuance of processes of evaluation and self-evaluation. The bilateral relation between school and public power might be the way to the participative institutional evaluation becomes a reality in the public schools of elementary degree. The model of the PIE proposed by the LOED intends to be one potential element of collective participatio...
