Brief Context
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The competitiveness, excellence and efficiency of education systems are currently key priorities in the international education agenda. In this way, education in Portugal has developed around a fundamental dilemma induced by this agenda: whether to preserve the state education system democratic values (equality, inclusion and citizenship) or to promote a variety of control mechanisms for monitoring results and rationalising resources.
The key structural aspects of nowadays' education policy are the internal and external school evaluation processes' institutionalisation, the implementation of a governance model centred on a unipersonal leadership, making school results' rankings public and the freedom of choice, the teacher performance assessment model's implementation and extending compulsory schooling up to the age of 12. Subject to this tension (more school / better school), state schools face the difficult task of reconciling two opposing requirements. How do schools accomplish this task? How do they use their relative autonomy to respond to pressures from both the Government and the market? Which matrix of values prevails in management practices: the values of excellence and meritocracy, those of inclusion, equty and school for everyone, or the extremely difficult reconciliation of these two goals? At a time when the Portuguese education system is still far from having managed to consolidate its democratising role, when we are witnessing the implementation of a school management system inspired in the new public management principles, it is urgent to analyse how schools are reacting to this tension, redefining their educational mandates.
The main aim of this proposal is to identify the various factors, internal and external to the school, which contribute to the students' academic excellence. Continuing along the lines of this research team, the aim now is to broaden and articulate three theoretical/disciplinary fields in approaching this issue: the educational policies highlighting the current neoliberal measures, the sociology of the non-school education, with particular emphasis on analysing the students' non-formal and informal educational routes, the social, economic and cultural conditions of the families; the sociology of educational organisations, with an emphasis on the democratisation of the school organisation, on the cultural and symbolic processes and the urgency of new modes of governance and leadership in schools.
The preliminary research that we carried out in a Portuguese state school allows us to identify some trends that will need to be further developed and validated throughout this project: the importance of gender when it comes to the willingness of students to study and the choice of their schooling trajectories; the different management of school and non-school times, with a particular emphasis on the need for tutoring; these students' alienation from school everyday life; the leadership role in socialization for excellence; the transversality of school excellence across the various social classes; a student's profile limited to its cognitive and instructional dimensions; the non-fulfilment of a student's expectations regarding his/her admission in the intended course/university [Palhares, J. A. & Torres, L. L. (2011)]; Torres, L. L. & Palhares, J. A. (2011b); Costa, J. A., Neto-Mendes, A. & Ventura, A. (2008)].
The development of an extensive and intensive multi-focused methodology will allow us to understand in a more precise way how this educational phenomenon can be defined. We hope the research results will clearly indicate the excellence profiles being developed in Portuguese schools, and also their educational, cultural and socio-economic impact. We also hope that, in a more political and strategic perspective, they can contribute to questioning a set of guidelines/recommendations for a clearer definition of the State School mission.
In: Overview of the proposal, FCT, 2012