Trend toward privatization and consequences in Brazilian public education

Abstract

This essay analyses the privatization trends in education resulting from neoliberal policies and New Public Management. The aim is to understand how the ideology of the State Reform of the 1990s, led by Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, and neoliberal policies have led to a trend towards the privatization of education, considering both long-standing and recent cases. To this end, bibliographical and documentary research was carried out, especially the MARE State Reform Notebooks. The text, organized into four sections, presents a critical theoretical framework for the analysis of managerial reform and its consequences for public schools. It highlights the alleged technical rationality and political neutrality, with the adoption of educational policies by successive governments, via managerial public administration, especially in the state of São Paulo. In addition to presenting the current stage of materialization of the trend towards the privatization of Brazilian public school education, it proposes some initiatives, seeking to contribute to governments being urged to implement, in the various administrative spheres, educational policies in opposition to the majority of policies in force at the time, which cannot even be characterized as republican.