Maria Eliana Alves Lima

Maria Eliana Alves Lima has a Master in Health and Environment from the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), Brazil, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Education with a project titled: "The Use of Public Resources and Participatory Management: A Study in State Schools of Maranhão”.

Supervisor: António Teodoro

• Democratic Management of Education
• Public Management
• Psychoanalysis
• Environmental Education
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Abstract of the PhD Project

The research analyzes the processes involved in the organization of the school, with school financial management as a strategy for the actions of educational agents through participation in school bodies. Discusses financial transfer policies for schools in Brazil, including the Maranhão state network, and its bases in the 1990 educational reform, promoted by international organizations, such as the World Bank, the FMI, UNESCO and the World Trade Organization , with an emphasis on the neoliberal conception, which established the guidelines for national education from the perspective of decentralization of management, school accountability for results, state regulation through evaluation and social control. This project is regulated in the Federal Constitution of Brazil (1988) and endorsed in the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education (LDBEN, 1996. The objective is to analyze the relationship between the transfer of federal public resources to state public schools in Maranhão/Brazil and the strengthening of democratic management, based on the participation of the school community in decisions on financial management. The study was based on bibliographical and documentary research on legislation for basic education, centered on the public policy cycle approach by Stephen Ball and a broad theoretical framework. The investigation is qualitative – descriptive and interpretative, whose technical procedures materialize in field research, using a questionnaire as a data collection technique, aiming to evaluate the role of decentralized school financial management in implementing management. The research participants were 285 school managers from the state education network in the State of Maranhão, whose management model adopted is democratic with pedagogical, administrative autonomy and collegial financial management determining the strategies for operating participation mechanisms. The results are anchored in the public policy cycle approach and recognize the context of school practices as a space for reconstructing the discourses elaborated by the texts that make up the national education policy. Considering the correlations made from the contexts of the educational policy cycle, it is considered that school financial management constitutes a normative axis of the actions of educational agents and ends up determining the participation of the community through legal means, whose process is presented as democratic.