MUNICIPAL EDUCATION COUNCIL OF CAICÓ/RN: FROM STRUCTURE TO PARTICIPATION
Municipal Education Council. Structure. Functioning. Participation.
This master’s degree thesis is linked to the “Education Policies and Management” line of research from the Master’s Program in Education at the “Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte (UERN)”. As its general objective, this project aims to study the structure and operation of the “Education City Council” or “Conselho Municipal de Educação (CME)” of Caicó/RN, during the period from 1998 to 2022. Additionally, this study also aims to identify the counselors’ role in the aforementioned council. Regarding its methods, this research consists of a qualitative study (Bogdan; Biklen, 1994; Yin, 2016), divided into two main parts: a) literature analysis of the following documents concerning Caicó’s CME: “Constituição Federal do Brasil de 1988”, “Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação (LDB 9.394/1996)”, “Plano Nacional de Educação (Law 13.005/2014)”, “Plano Estadual de Educação (Law 10.049/2016)”, “Plano Municipal de Educação de Caicó (Law 4.799/2015)”, CME’s Internal Regulations, and Meeting Minutes; b) participant observation and questionnaire application to titular counselors, with open-ended and closed questions. The data will be subjected to the content analysis method (Bardin, 2016) and further examined based on the following authors: Bobbio (1986), Bordenave (1994), Leal (2012), Pateman (1992), Touraine (1996), Dawbor (2016), Bordignon (2009), Gohn (1997, 2002, 2007, 2019), Cury (2006, 2013), Vieira (2011, 2015), and Andrade (2011). CME represents a mechanism of democratic expansion, whose main attribution is to defend and fight for the rights and principles of quality, secular, and public education. CME is linked to the “City Secretary of Education” or “Secretaria Municipal de Educação (SME)”, thus SME should provide technical and financial support for CME to secure adequate structure and operation for the development of its attributions, with the effective participation of the counselors. We've concluded that CME, despite having consistent documentation regarding its structure and operation, only plays a formal role because its political actions are not implemented. Furthermore, this research has also identified a city where coronelist and patrimonialist practices are still the norm in both society and politics, constraining the effective participation of the counselors.