Eleição direta para diretor de escola na rede municipal de ensino de Natal/RN: construções históricas e embates políticos

Abstract

This research deals with the election for principals of school units in the Municipal Education Network of Natal/RN, whose process has been going on continuously since 1987. Natal was one of the first municipalities in Brazil to implement the direct election for school principal and to establish the democratic management in an institutional way in its education system, before the Federal Constitution of 1988 and approving specific municipal Law of Democratic Management (2008 and 2015). Thus, this investigation aims to understand and analyse the process of construction and implementation of the election for choice of principal in the Municipal Education Network in Natal / RN, placing it, historically, in the local and national context. In order to do that, the dialectical historical materialism was based on epistemological and the documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews carried out with historical subjects who lived, directly or indirectly, the election for school principal in the municipal teaching units in Natal/RN, as technical procedures. In this path, its historical origin was reconstructed, the desires and the realization of this practice from the perspective of documents and interviewees. In addition, considering that its permanence results from a historical process that is guided by the contradiction of power inherent to the way of doing politics in the country. In this sense, there is a direct relationship between the election and the materialization of democratic management, these are historically composed, and are constituted in the conduct of the democratic experience. The teaching units are revealed as resistance and reproducer of a practice historically constructed in Brazil in democratic spaces. Despite its multiple problems and conflicts, its permanence is a struggle that is necessary, without it, there is room for loss of spaces for important dialogues in a country that is still in the process of democratic learning.