Managerial restructuring of School and Teachers’ Work

Abstract

This article analyzes modes of managerialism as State restructuring and its effects on education, particularly on school governance, curriculum and teachers’ work. Managerialism pursues criteria based on productivity, consumer-based models, decentralization, efficiency, accountability, evaluation, public-private partnership and quasi-market. This neoliberal and managerial approaches interpelate schools and teachers, in order to reach a subjectivation to induct an acceptance and consensual behaviors, which are very productive to build educational policies market-based - performativity. Such policies have been very successful in influencing school governance, curriculum and school practices. This paper tries to demonstrate there are significant impacts to the school labor process, teachers’ work and school governance, what have provoked shifts in school organization, working condition, and intensification. These modes of control and regulation, based on public-private partnership, introduce new requirements to teachers, who became unique responsible and blamed to their own performance. This article concludes there are many indicators to show that those policies have been extraordinarily expensive to the public funding and have not been so effective to improve education quality as promised.

Keywords

• Managerialism
• School Governance
• Currculum
• Teachers’ Work