WHEN PERSISTENCE CEASES TO BE POLICY

Abstract

This article critically analyzes four policies and beliefs widely legitimized in the Brazilian educational debate—school inclusion, continuous progression, the centrality of assessment, and family involvement in schools—interpreting them, in their historically hollowed-out forms of implementation, as the "dead horses" of contemporary educational management. Adopting the "dead horse" theory as a critical-analytical framework, the text argues that certain responses persist less due to their pedagogical efficacy than to their political-administrative and symbolic functionality in contexts defined by performativity, accountability, and results-based management. Drawing on the work of Ball (2014), Freitas (2014), Libâneo (2015), Saviani (2011), Paro (2011), Mantoan (2004), Glat and Pletsch (2011), Hoffmann (2014), Esteban (2003), and Sousa and Oliveira (2010), the argument is made that the problem lies not in the normative principles themselves—inclusion, democratization, assessment, participation, and the right to learning—but in their bureaucratized, formalistic, or performative translations. Under these conditions, inclusion tends to be reduced to enrollment and protocol; continuous progression to the statistical management of student flow; assessment to the capture of quality via indicators or classification routines; and the family-school relationship to the moralization of the educational crisis. The central hypothesis is that a significant portion of the impasses facing Brazilian basic education stems less from a lack of proposals than from the persistence of models whose current operational forms are worn out, yet remain protected by their political, bureaucratic, and discursive utility.