Avaliação institucional: mobilizando a escola para melhoria da qualidade da educação

Abstract

In the 1990s, a new paradigm is established for public schools in Brazil. The school needs to abandon the assistencialist practices imposed by the massification of scholarization and to assume the role of guaranteeing learning. However, the school does not seem to be able to mobilize its resources to fulfill the goal proposed by society. In order to construct autonomy an organization must know with clarity its goals and the guide its actions to such ends. A method that leads the school to define its goals and from them assess its actions presents itself as a necessary support to reach high standards of autonomy. The goal of this Educational Action Plan (PAE, in Portuguese) is to propose a model of Institutional Assessment to state schools of basic education in the state of Espírito Santo which may provide information to various levels of school management regarding the processes occurring in the school and that, simultaneously, may introduce the school to the core of assessment and work as a support to the mobilization of its practices in the sense of causing effective change. The methods of institutional assessment already implemented at Brazilian schools address several dimensions, such as the pedagogical management, participative management and human resources. The educational processes are assessed, but the results are not systematically utilized by managers and schools to transform and innovate the work. The fundaments and principles of autonomy, legitimacy and participation are common elements to various experiences of institutional school assessment, in Brazil and in other countries, which endorse the improvement in the quality of teaching. The connection between the external assessment and the internal one, or self-assessment, is also made clear in many initiatives of school assessment. The proposed Institutional Assessment System shall, therefore, be guided by the defined goals, be centered in the measurement of the results obtained, consider the processes and means mobilized to reach such results, value the internal and external assessments in the management process and involve the evaluation system users.