Eficácia escolar e liderança pedagógica dos diretores escolares da rede municipal de educação de Belo Horizonte no contexto da gestão democrática

Abstract

The importance of pedagogical management at municipal schools and its relation with the principal’s leadership has been increasingly acknowledged by Belo Horizonte’s Municipal Educational Secretariat (SMED). Those factors, when associated with school effectiveness, imply the assurance of students’ learning within their rightful age group for their current schooling year (which is benchmarked through indicators of school performance). This acknowledging process is identified through SMED initiatives (especially those that took place between the years of 2009/2012) that incorporate and consolidate procedures that assure the principal’s commitment to school performance’s results. However, there is no rupture with the principles of democratic management at Municipal Educational Network: it assures scholar community’s participation at management processes and the principal’s prerogative to be selected exclusively through a direct election. The present case intends to identify and analyze how far a principal’s leadership can go to contribute for school effectiveness in that context. Next, it propounds SMED a guiding document, contributing to the process’ convergence. The theoretical referential deepens school effectiveness and director’s leadership concepts, as well as subsidizes the empirical municipal school data analysis (it uses the Interactive PDE diagnosis, a tool the Ministry of Education, MEC, makes available). This Plan of Action proposition is about presenting an instrument to monitor municipal school’s pedagogical management. This instrument should be able to recover the school processes dynamics and transmute the very own SMED monitoring efforts into a former process to school principals.