from patronage politics to community deliberation: the recent experience of democratic school...

public administration and development

Public Admin. Dev. 27, 273–282 (2007)

Published online 3 August 2007 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.464

FROM PATRONAGE POLITICS TO COMMUNITY DELIBERATION:THE RECENT EXPERIENCE OF DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL

MANAGEMENT IN BRAZIL

ANDRE BORGES1,2*,y

1Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil2St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

SUMMARY

The article discusses the limits and possibilities of school empowerment within education systems plagued by pervasivepatronage politics. The analysis focuses on reform initiatives implemented by Brazilian sub-national governments throughoutthe 1980s and 1990s to allow for the election of school principals by parents, teachers and students. Until the implementation ofthis reform, state and local authorities had relied on the school system as a source of patronage resources, and principals werenominated according to political criteria. The new system of democratic school management was expected to undermine thispatronage-based system and foster community participation in school decisions. The article relies on secondary evidence toassess the impact of school elections in what concerns the participation of parents, students and teachers in school affairs and therelationship between schools, party politicians and education administrators. It concludes that high levels of social inequalityand the lack of a universalistic and effective system of welfare provision constitute serious obstacles to the empowerment ofdisadvantaged groups in developing societies such as Brazil. On the other hand, the article argues that school empowerment hasthe potential to undermine resilient patronage structures, by introducing universalistic mechanisms of decision-making andmaking school administrators more accountable to their constituencies. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

key words— school reform; empowerment; decentralisation; patronage politics; Brazil

INTRODUCTION

In the last decades there has been a movement of worldwide dimensions towards the decentralisation of educational

management. Reforms in both developed and developing countries have been aiming at the devolution of

administrative and financial authority to schools and at the creation of collegiate and democratic structures devised

to empower school communities. School empowerment has been presented as a solution to a wide range of

educational problems, from poor students’ performance to red tape and lack of family involvement in school affairs.

It has been defended on the grounds of its potential to deepen democracy, improve administrative efficiency and

educational performance, downsize educational bureaucracies and introduce competitive pressures within

education (Hess, 1991; Lauglo, 1995; World Bank, 1995; Handler, 1996; Fischman and Mclaren, 2000).

Widely held expectations on the virtuous effects of school empowerment have been contradicted by actual

experiences of reform, though, as there seems to be evidence that such policies are often ineffective in submitting

schools to civil society control and, especially, in empowering individuals from socially disadvantaged

backgrounds (Mattos, 1998; Whitty et al., 1998; Jacobs, 2000; Munn, 2000). Research on school reform has also

raised the concern that the devolution of power and authority to school communities may reinforce social

fragmentation and educational inequality, in the absence of mechanisms designed to support the less well-off

schools and students (Moore, 1990; Whitty and Power, 2000; Martins, 2001).

*Correspondence to: A. Borges, Rua Prof. Ivo Corseuil, 305/302, CEP 90690-410, Porto Alegre, Brazil.E-mail: [email protected] Research Fellow and D.Phil in Political Science.

Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

274 A. BORGES

In developing countries where educational bureaucracies lack institutional autonomy and policy decisions are

driven by short-term electoral interests, the challenge of school empowerment is made tougher by the pervasiveness

of patronage politics in personnel recruitment and resource allocation. In these settings, the issue is not only one of

fighting against centralisation and bureaucratic inefficiency, and allowing civil society actors to voice their demands

more effectively, but it also involves a concern with the introduction of more universalistic criteria to guide

education policies.

This article discusses the limits and potentialities of community empowerment in education in the context of a

politicised system of education provision—it focuses on the recent introduction of mechanisms of democratic school

management in Brazil. Brazilian public education, under both authoritarian and democratic regimes, has been

characterised by the pervasive influence of party politics in policy decisions, and elected officials have routinely relied

on education policies as a source of patronage to be delivered for electoral gain (Germano, 1992; Plank, 1996).

As the negative impact of patronage politics on the quality and effectiveness of education became more and more

evident in the last few decades, politicians and educational administrators have shown greater disposition to reform the

system. Since the transition to democracy in the early 1980s, Brazilian sub-national governments have adopted new

administrative practices designed to increase accountability and empower school communities. Reforms have

included the devolution of administrative and financial authority to school councils comprising parents, students and

teachers, greater school autonomy in the definition of budgets and the management of personnel, and the direct

election of school principals. The article focuses on the last of these reforms, which was devised to shift the power to

appoint principals from educational authorities to parents, students and teachers and other school staff.

Until the recent wave of school reform, state governors and mayors distributed school direction posts according

to narrowly political criteria, which often resulted in poor administrative performance. The introduction of school

elections was expected to put an end to political manipulation of school decisions and make school management

more democratic and accountable to the community.

The article relies on secondary research evidence to demonstrate that this reform has achieved mixed results. On

the one hand, empowerment initiatives have had a positive impact by making the procedures employed for selecting

principals more transparent and reducing the role of patronage politics in education decisions. On the other hand,

school governance reforms have been little effective in submitting schools to civil society control and

institutionalising participation in school decision-making. The article concludes by pointing out the obstacles to

effective empowerment that are present in highly unequal societies such as Brazil, where a universalistic and

effective system of social provision is lacking.

EMPOWERMENT AND SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

The concept of empowerment has been associated with the creation of independent and self-managed

organisations. It can be defined as the capacity to control one’s environment. Empowerment involves not only

access to material resources and control over the relevant decisions, but also a psychological disposition compatible

with one’s self-governing (Handler, 1996). Empowerment is usually associated with political decentralisation, in so

far as it involves transferring decision-making power to groups or individuals previously under-represented or

excluded from decision-making, and the creation of relatively autonomous administrative units. Administrative

decentralisation, in contrast, is more limited, for it involves only de-concentrating power within existing

bureaucratic structures, and it is not intended to empower disadvantaged groups (Samoff, 1990; Sundar, 2001).

Starting from distinct theoretical perspectives, educationalists and policy makers have proposed various models

of school empowerment, from the creation of quasi-markets to the revision of traditional teaching methods and the

decentralisation of curricula. As a general rule, neo-liberal reformers display a preference for market incentives and

tighter administrative controls, whereas the tradition of progressive pedagogical thought associates empowerment

with consciousness-raising, collective mobilisation and democratic radicalisation (Freire, 1972; Chubb and Moe,

1988; Gandim and Apple, 2002).

In the Brazilian context, the advocacy of the school empowerment by the political left was strongly associated

with the critique of the authoritarian state and its model of educational governance. During the return to democracy

Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 27, 273–282 (2007)

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THE EXPERIENCE OF DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL MANAGEMENT IN BRAZIL 275

in the 1980s, decentralised educational management was defended by the opposition to the military and by the

political left, on the grounds that it would contribute to deepen democracy and challenge elitist and authoritarian

styles of school management, making the educational system truly responsive to the needs of the popular classes

(Cunha, 1991; Rodrigues, 1997).

In the 1990s, following the re-organisation of centre-right political forces at the national level, the left’s agenda

of school decentralisation was reoriented according to a neo-liberal perspective. The previous emphasis on popular

consciousness-raising and the radicalisation of democracy was replaced by matters of competitiveness,

cost-reduction and human capital development (Cunha, 1995; Oliveira, 2000).

Ideological divergences aside, both left-wing and right-wing advocates of school reform shared a similar

understanding that fighting patronage politics in education was a key goal of community empowerment. In view of

the lack of a universalistic model of educational provision, education reformers’ diagnosis of the problems of

education management focused on the pervasiveness of clientelism and corruption and their negative impact on the

quality of education, rather than on the detrimental effects of bureaucratisation per se.

EDUCATION POLICY AND DECENTRALISATION IN BRAZIL: AN OVERVIEW

In some important respects, the Brazilian experience of school reform was peculiar due to the nature of the country’s

federalism, which grants sub-national authorities a substantial degree of autonomy in the management and

organisation of their educational systems. Rather than resulting from the initiative of central authorities, school

decentralisation depended mostly on political decisions taken by local and state governments, even though the federal

government has showed disposition to support sub-national reforms in the recent years (Almeida, 1995; Castro, 2000).

At least since the early Republican period (1889–1930), the provision of basic schooling in Brazil has been

divided among the three spheres of government—federal, state and local—with each retaining authority over its

own network of schools. Traditionally, the main responsibility for providing basic education has resided with state

and municipal governments. The ministry of education has remained responsible for administering the federal

system of public universities and providing technical and financial assistance to state and local authorities. As a

general rule, state governments are responsible for providing the last cycle of the primary schooling (5th–8th grade)

and secondary schooling, whereas elementary education is left to local authorities.

The 1988 constitution reinforced the role of sub-national authorities in the provision of education, devolving

authority and financial resources to state- and municipal-level educational systems (Souza, 1993; Almeida, 1995).

By the mid-1990s, as a result of changes in legislation, state and municipal governments together accounted for

80% of total expenditure in education (Fernandes, 1998).

Decentralisation of public resources and authority was accompanied by a relative loss of control of the centre

over sub-national education policies during the 1980s and early 1990s, as the federal government was unable to

follow a coherent strategy of reform and thus provide guidance and support to state and local governments (Cunha,

1991; Plank, 1996). Due to the retreat of the centre and the lack of intergovernmental coordination, Brazil

continued to lag behind its neighbours in educational development. School failure and drop-out remained at very

high levels, and, by the early 1990s, Brazil had one of the worst educational performances in Latin America. Only

Haiti had a lower primary school completion rate (Birdsall and Sabot, 1996; Hall, 2003).

In the face of these gloomy indicators, some state governments decided to take action to address the pitfalls of

basic education. During the 1980s and 1990s, sub-national reformers proposed and implemented innovative

policies designed to improve coordination between state and local educational authorities, devolve power and

authority to school councils and reduce political interference in personnel recruitment and resource allocation

(Cunha, 1991; Barros and Mendonca, 1998).1

1This sub-national wave of education reforms was followed by a series of federal initiatives devised to improve policy coordination amongthe three spheres of government, increase per capita expenditure on primary education and attack regional inequalities in the late 1990s(Castro et al., 2000; Cury, 2002; Brasil, 2003).


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276 A. BORGES

State politics and school governance reform

Until the recent sub-national wave of reform, decentralisation across levels of government was matched by

centralisation within each administrative sphere. State and local schools had very little administrative and financial

autonomy, and most of the relevant decisions had to be negotiated directly with the central offices of the Secretariats

of Education. Educational authorities enjoyed an enormous degree of discretion in policy decisions concerning the

allocation of jobs and resources, which often led to the exploration of education policy for political gain.

In most cases, state governors distributed the top posts of the state Secretariats of Education among party

politicians in exchange for political support in the state assembly. As long as educational bureaucracies were

submitted to political coalition-making dynamics, personnel turnover was usually high, leading to policy instability

and poor administrative performance. For instance, research in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul found out that a total

11 secretaries of education were nominated between 1983 and 1990, an average of 1.4 per year (Fernandes, 2001).

Politicians named as secretaries would often take advantage of control over the secretariat’s large budget and

thousands of politically appointive posts to improve their future electoral prospects, rewarding voters, party

officials and local political brokers with the construction of new school places and appointment to low-level

administrative positions (Souza, 1997; Rocha, 2000; Borges, 2007).

Teachers and other school staff with connections to politicians and top educational administrators benefited from

the clientelistic system by obtaining transferral from classroom to much less demanding administrative activities. In

the state of Bahia, an official study of the state education bureaucracy concluded in 1990 found out that 53% of the

civil servants employed by schools were involved in administrative and technical activities (Bahia State Secretariat

of Education, 1990). In the context of administrative centralisation and politicisation, even routine decisions such as

the purchase of school desks and chairs were subject to political interference, as school administrators’ capacity to

obtain access to additional resources would often depend on their political connections (Plank, 1996).

Substantial changes to patterns of recruitment to the tops posts of the state Secretariats of Education

accompanied the decentralising reforms of the 1980s and 1990s in many states. Academics, senior civil servants

and union leaders started to occupy the administrative positions that had been previously controlled by traditional

politicians, in the wake of political democratisation (Cunha, 1991; Rocha, 2000; Fernandes, 2001; Borges, 2006).

These reformist-minded elites defended the decentralisation of administrative authority and resources to schools as

a means to undermining resilient coalitions-for-patronage within the education system and improving

administrative performance and accountability.

The direct election of school principals gained special prominence in the decentralisation agenda due to its

potential to foster community participation and reduce political interference in school decisions. Traditionally,

school principalships served as a source of patronage that was exploited for electoral gain by party politicians.

Partisan control of school management contributed to principals’ lack of responsiveness towards the communities

they were expected to serve because their permanence in the post depended not on administrative performance, but

rather on the political clout of their patrons (Paro, 1996; Plank, 1996).

Even though school principals do not command significant resources, as compared to other local administrators,

having control over school appointments offered great opportunities for political parties seeking to mobilise voters

state-wide. These opportunities existed because of the territorial penetration of the educational system—one might

find schools even in the poorest and more rural communities—and also due to the fact that principals were in direct

and constant contact with large numbers of parents and students, making them potential community leaders and

vote-gatherers in election years. Also school management posts constituted a very substantial share of the total

number of politically appointed posts within educational bureaucracies, which happened to be the largest

bureaucratic structures at the state level—in some populous states, governors used to appoint over 6000 principals

at the start of their terms (Planck, 1996; Oliveira, 1999).

Innovative methods for selecting principals were first implemented following the return to democracy in the

early 1980s. Some states adopted the election of principals by school communities, whereas others decided to

combine a competitive exam and an electoral contest. In most states, the right to vote was extended not only to

teachers and other school staff, but also to parents and students aged 12 or more. In the majority of the cases, the


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reform was implemented in all primary and secondary schools managed by the state government. Although there

remain states in which principals continue to be nominated according to political criteria, the diffusion of these

changes has been rather rapid. Based on a number of nation-wide surveys (Barros and Mendonca, 1998; Parente and

Luck, 1999; Melo, 2003), I estimated that 14 out of 27 states were already employing school elections for selecting

principals by 2002. I also found that these reforms were able to survive electoral cycles, in most cases. In 11 out of

the 14 states which had instituted school elections, the new procedures had been in place for at least two

gubernatorial terms (8 years).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these reforms have been associated with broader changes in the operation of state

education bureaucracies.2 As a matter of fact, in three of the states where school elections had been in place for at

least 8 years by 2002 (Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul and Ceara), state elites, regardless of party orientation,

decided to preserve the Secretariats of Education from partisan influence, adopting strategies of nomination

that privileged the appointees’ academic credentials and professional skills (Rocha, 2000; Fernandes, 2001). Also,

these states exhibited substantial policy continuity in the education sector throughout the recent period, despite

alternation in power among different political coalitions. Finally, education reformers in these states were

successful in introducing more universalistic criteria to guide the allocation of resources to schools, and the

establishment of technical and financial cooperation agreements among the state and municipal governments

(Guedes et al., 1997; Cenpec, 1999; Grindle, 2004).

If school governance reforms were associated with broader changes in education policy and administration in

these states, the opposite seems to be true for the non-reforming states. In the state of Bahia, where traditional

methods for selecting principals did not wither away, patronage-seeking politicians continued to play a key role in

other domains of education policy as well. Local mayors and state deputies maintained privileged access to the

education bureaucracy, despite recent reform attempts supported by the World Bank and other international agencies.

THE IMPACT OF SCHOOL ELECTIONS

This comparative evidence provides indication that school elections were associated with the decay of traditional

schemes of patronage distribution within public education. In the following sections, I present detailed evidence on

the changes brought about by this reform, in what concerns relations internal to schools and in the way in which

civil society and governmental actors interact with and participate in schools. I assess the impact of school elections

by relying on secondary research evidence on eight Brazilian states: Parana, Rio Grande do Sul, Federal District,

Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Ceara and Minas Gerais.3

Principals and school communities

In what concerns the relationship between principals and school communities, existing research suggests that

school elections have fostered some significant behavioural changes. Research in the states of Rio Grande do Sul,

Parana, Mato Grosso and Minas Gerais revealed that elected principals tended to be more concerned about the

demands of their school communities. Besides, the relationship between principals and school communities

improved, as principals left aside authoritarian and formalistic styles of leadership side (Heeman, 1986; Werle,

1991; Guedes et al., 1997; Torres and Garske, 2000).

Principals interviewed by Torres and Garske (2000: 63) in Mato Grosso recognised they were under constant

pressure of their voters to solve schools’ problems. In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, it was noted that elected

principals tended to be more concerned about the interests and demands of school staff, parents and students (Paro,

1996: 117). Another important aspect is that school elections led principals to become more flexible and attentive

leaders (Heeman, 1986; Guedes et al., 1997; Torres and Garske, 2000).

2This section is partly based on my own research in the states of Ceara, Minas Gerais and Bahia in the first semester of 2003. The detailedresearch results can be seen in my Ph.D. thesis entitled Politics, Education and Institutional Change: Reforming School Governance in Brazil(University of Oxford, 2005). Secondary references are indicated in the body of the text.3The main criterion for selecting these eight states was that of availability of empirical research. This sample thus includes the cases in whichreforms have lasted long enough and/or are sufficiently old to allow for retrospective evaluation.


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278 A. BORGES

In the state of Ceara, ethnographic research in state schools found that school-level elections allowed for greater

control over principals’ actions. Opposition candidates and those groups discontented with a principal’s

administration would often spend time scrutinising incumbents’ actions. On a more negative side, however, it was

noted that principals sometimes adopted a ‘laissez-faire’ position towards absentee or poor-performing teachers, as

they feared that being too strict would cost them votes in the following election (Aquino, 1997).

These results were consistent with findings of other state-level research, which observed that teachers and other

school staff tend to take advantage of the electoral process to make principals accountable to their interests and

advance particularistic demands. Research in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana found

evidence that teachers expected principals to be more ‘benevolent’ in dealing with day-to-day issues of personnel

management (Heeman, 1986; Werle, 1991).

That teachers and other school staff have taken advantage of school elections to advance their corporative

interests is not totally surprising, considering the original motivations behind their advocacy of this reform. For

teachers and their unions, school elections represented mainly a means to making principals more accountable to

teachers and other school staff and, especially, more sympathetic toward teacher striking (Ribeiro, 1995; Paro,

1996). In some cases, teachers adopted an elitist position, refusing to accept the participation of parents and

students in the electoral process. In the state of Parana, for instance, 56.8% of a representative sample of teachers

interviewed by Heeman (1986: 57) defended restrictions on parents and students’ right to vote.

In spite of teachers’ resistance, parents and students have been allowed to choose their principals in the majority

of cases, as noted by Paro (1996). This is a rather positive trend considering that the interests of school users and

teachers may not coincide in some issues, such as teacher striking. Another positive aspect is that school elections in

several states have been marked by very high rates of turn-out and mobilisation (Zabot, 1984; Heeman, 1986; Mello

and Silva, 1994; Paro, 1996; Melo, 2003).

Politicians, bureaucrats and the school system

If all these trends indicate important changes at the school level, probably the most important modification has been

in terms of the relationship between the party-in-government and the school system. School elections introduced a

fundamental change in the pre-existing patronage structures, by shifting the lines of accountability from the

government to school communities. A general finding of research in several states that have been experiencing with

school-level elections is that party politicians have lost much of the power to interfere with school management.

Although analysts have been careful enough to point out that clientelistic relationships often persist within schools,

at the same time there seems to be a consensus in that elections at the school level have been mostly free and fair,

and external interference (e.g. by the secretariat of Education or by local politicians) has been either absent or not

significant to compromise the results (Heeman, 1986; Melo and Silva, 1994; Paro, 1996; Vieira, 1996).

School elections have impacted more clearly on the relationship between principals and the

party-in-government. In many cases, principals adopted a more independent position relatively to the state

governor and the top educational authorities. A particularly emblematic and extreme case occurred in the Federal

District in 1985. At that time, a majority of elected principals decided to disobey government orders and refuse to

participate in the implementation of a new program of school lunch distribution. The reason was that principals

feared the manipulation of the school lunch program by machine politicians, in the eve of mayoral elections that

year (Mendonca, 1987). Conflicts between the state Executive and elected principals have been also evident in the

issue of teacher striking. In many cases, principals left aside their previous role of surveillance and control of union

activity, siding with strikers (Leal and Silva, 1987; Paro, 1996: 188).

Although it is certainly the case that elected principals have often relied on their recently gained powers to

defend teachers’ corporative interests, there is also evidence of their willingness to place broader demands on top

educational authorities. In the states of Minas Gerais and Ceara, one important research finding was that not only

parents and students had become more demanding towards their schools, but also school communities and their

leadership had adopted a much more active role in seeking central authorities’ attention to schools’ daily problems

(Melo and Silva, 1994; Vieira, 1996).


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There is also evidence that schools’ administration became less dependent on the central and intermediate

bureaucracies in those cases in which school elections were implemented in association with the devolution of

financial authority to school councils. One especially noticeable trend was the weakening of middle-level

bureaucrats such as school inspectors and regional education directors, who were in charge of overseeing policy

implementation and intermediating schools’ demands relative to technical and financial assistance. As long as

schools and their principals gained greater financial and administrative autonomy, these middle-level

decision-making instances lost much of their powers. In the case of Minas Gerais, it was noted that school

decentralisation together with the introduction of universalistic criteria of resource allocation (e.g. based on

the distribution of students across schools) weakened the clientelistic system, as principals became less dependent

on political connections to patrons well-positioned in the education bureaucracy to attend the demands of their

constituencies (Guedes et al., 1997; Rocha, 2000). Conversely, where the introduction of school elections was not

accompanied by the devolution of financial and administrative authority to schools, principals found themselves in

a much weaker position relative to brokerage networks within the Secretariat of Education.4

One must note, though, that this is a relatively unusual situation, as democratic school management has been

most often followed by an increase of schools’ financial and administrative powers (Barros and Mendonca, 1998).

As a general rule, principals have been able to establish a more direct relationship with the central education

authorities, in parallel to the loss of importance of middle-level bureaucracies and local political brokers (Paro,

1996; Zibas, 2005).

Continuity and change in the governance of schooling

Although the available evidence suggests that elected principals tend to be more accountable to school

communities and less prone to authoritarian styles of leadership, on the other hand there are signs that parental and

student participation in school management have not increased as expected. Principals, teachers and other school

staff continue to maintain an upper hand in the management of schools (Heeman, 1986; Paixao, 1994; Vieira, 1996;

Torres and Garske, 2000). In a sense, however, this is not at all surprising considering that similarly disappointing

results were observed in experiences of school empowerment implemented elsewhere (Whitty et al., 1998). As well

noted by radical, liberating pedagogies, schools are by nature undemocratic institutions, whose legitimacy is based

upon the logic of discipline and authority personified by teachers and principals.

In developing societies such as Brazil, high levels of social inequality and poor citizens’ dependence on the state

constitute additional obstacles to effective empowerment. One must note that schools and their principals play a

very important in providing parents and students from popular backgrounds access to a series of publicly provided

social services. According to ethnographic research carried on by Castro (2000) in the state of Rio Grande Sul,

these include not only services and goods which schools are formally equipped to offer—such as school lunch and

medical assistance—but also informal assistance to those students facing psychological and learning problems,

whose families lack the willingness or the resources to help them. The same research observed that principals had a

crucial role in intermediating the demands of students and their families, and assisting students in personal and

academic matters.

In view of poor families’ situation of hopelessness and dependence vis-a-vis educational institutions, one cannot

expect reforms such as school elections to promote radical and rapid changes in entrenched patterns of state-society

articulation. The Brazilian experience reveals that parent participation and involvement in school affairs is a direct

function of income and education; better-off families tend to take greater advantage of new mechanisms of

participation, whereas the poorest ones are more likely to see themselves as ‘clients’ of the state and behave

accordingly (Mattos, 1998; Castro, 2000).5 As the latter patterns are very likely to persist in the absence of broader

4See for instance the study of Vieira (1996) on the initial impacts of school elections in the state of Ceara. The devolution of financial authoritywas implemented only a few years after the introduction of elections in 1995.5One must note that Brazil’s school system, similarly to other Latin American countries, has been characterised by a historical dualism betweenelite and popular education: private, higher quality schools are mostly attended by the sons of the middle-class and the elite, whereas state schoolsare attended by the poor, who lack the financial means to pay for education.


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280 A. BORGES

changes in the structure of social stratification and in the extension and quality of welfare provision in Brazil, one

must recognise that recent empowerment reforms are insufficient to secure citizens’ effective participation in

education decisions.

CONCLUSION

The Brazilian experience of school reform analysed in this article demonstrates rather clearly that there exist some

deep, structural obstacles to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups in the context of a highly unequal society

lacking an effective and universalistic system of welfare provision. As well noted by Handler (1996), there is an

intrinsic contradiction in the idea of empowerment, as it prescribes a democratic and egalitarian process among

participants who are unequal in terms of power, social status and resources.

In spite of such structural difficulties, there are grounds to be optimistic on the possibilities open for community

empowerment as a partial antidote to highly politicised and poorly accountable bureaucracies. The passage from a

patronage-based to a democratic system of appointment represented a huge change for the Brazilian sub-national

education systems, as it implied the erosion of the influence previously held by party politicians in schools’ daily

life. Once the governing parties lost the capacity to appoint them, principals were unlikely to conform to their

previous role of local leaders at the service of the governing party. School elections opened space for the inclusion

of the interests and demands of school communities, weakening the ties that linked principals to party politicians.

Further, in association with the devolution of financial and administrative authority to schools, democratic school

management reduced the power and influence of brokerage networks within the education bureaucracy, and it

allowed for a closer interaction between schools and the top education authorities.

What remains unclear is to what extent the new governance structures had a positive on the quality of education.

Certainly, as long as school communities gained the right to replace poor-performing principals at the end of their

terms, there was greater accountability and incentives for innovative and efficient administration (Melo, 2003). On

the other hand, one may still ask whether micro-behavioural changes at the school level are in themselves enough to

improve macro-educational indicators.

Although a recent statistical study found evidence that the election of school principals has a positive impact on

students’ performance (Barros and Mendonca, 1997), the conclusions obtained from this kind of research are hard

to assess, due to factors such as the lack of appropriate baseline data. Besides, the fact that improvements in

educational indicators in the successful cases of reform such as the state of Minas Gerais were at most marginal

(Grindle, 2004), suggests that one should not overstate the potential effect of governance reforms in the absence of

broader changes in the distribution and levels of education spending.

Overall, the lesson to be drawn from the Brazilian experience of democratic school management is that school

empowerment, despite its pitfalls, may contribute to undermine entrenched patronage structures, increasing the

transparency of education decisions and making school administrators more accountable to their constituencies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article has resulted from a Ph.D. research on the politics of school governance reform in Brazil. The author is

thankful to the Brazilian Council for Scientific Development (CNPq) for supporting his work in the form of a Ph.D.

scholarship.

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