A intervenção dos pais no governo da escola pública: estudo de caso

The present investigation focuses on the field of study of autonomy policies in Portuguese public schools and, particularly, the parental intervention in its government. We attempted to combine a theoretical approach in the analysis of public policies of education, which include the implementation of the new juridical regime, regarding schools’ autonomy, administration and management, the Decree Law n.er 75/2008, of the 22nd of April, and the organizational look, the means by which families participation reinforcement is accomplished, in the direction of a public school organization (located in the mid-region of Portugal) whose work we followed and analyzed, intensively. The main purpose of this investigation was to verify the articulation, or the lack of it, between the rhetoric’s of speech and the actor’s practices, their direct intervention and their logics of action, concerning the new models of power regulation - the governance - that shape the current educational legislation, among western countries, resulting from the crisis of centralist models. We tried to answer a number of questions that might unveil their logics of action, in their power relationships with the other partners of this political organization, giving privilege to political analysis. The answers confirm the disarticulation between the rhetoric’s of official documents, which legitimize a bureaucratic order, and the field of action, where our study shows the political character of parental intervention, in the implicit or explicit struggles for an asymmetrical repartition of power in this organization. It also reveals the parents will to have a voice in the guiding lines of school life, establishing a breaking point with secular studies that condemn families to passivity, to immobilization and to the deficit of preparation to act, in spite of the obstacles to their democratic participation.