Selection of school principals and the meaning of school management: principals’ perceptions about the management plan

ABSTRACT Mixed mechanisms for selecting school principals have been increasingly established in public education systems in Brazil in order to assess the technical and political competence of candidates to manage schools. In the context of the process of decentralizing educational policies and affirming the post-bureaucratic paradigm of the management matrix, the management plan, a technical requirement for selecting principals, is an instrument to induce the use of educational indicators, the definition of goals and the achievement of school effectiveness. Based on bibliographic and documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, this case study seeks to verify the perceptions of the principals of two public schools in Rio de Janeiro, considering them as street-level bureaucrats, regarding the implementation of diagnosis and self-evaluation, which are constitutive stages of the management plan in schools. We found that the principals who took part in the study acted with margins of freedom to manage the process and, based on different experiences and values, they attributed different meanings to the management plans.