Privatist conceptions in the state’s public sphere: An analysis of the “Common National Matrix of Competences for School Principal”

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the concept of the desirable school principal, present in the text of the “Common National Competency Matrix for School Principals” – a document approved by the National Education Council that is awaiting homologation by the Ministry of Education, whose content aims to define the competencies of school principals of public and private schools throughout the country – and in the discourses of two important private apparatuses of hegemony that operate in the Brazilian educational field – the Itaú Social Foundation and the Unibanco Institute. To this end, this study used document analysis and content analysis, from which it was possible to observe that there is a consistent convergence between the aforementioned actors regarding the concept under analysis. The text of the Matrix and the documents analyzed bring the idea of the manager anchored in premises enunciated in the New Public Management, predominantly managerial, meritocratic and uniformitarian.