Descentralização administrativa e autonomia das escolas: 2015: o ano em que se dá mais um passo em frente?

With the publication of Decree-Law No. 30/2015 and with the implementation of the Programme Apromixar (Approach), the local authorities apparently gained a new role in the evolution of education management policies and, more precisely, in the “local coordination of education”. It is this political initiative that this text questions, under the light of the recent history of educational administration in Portugal, of the deep reorganization of the network of schools and the recent research on these issues. It will be a new process of decentralization of educational administration? It will support the strengthening of school autonomy? Or is it a way to turn the municipalities in the main local interlocutor of the Ministry of Education? Why the “local coordination of education”, in this experimental chaos, would be different if all around remains the same, the same model of central government, the same model of state control regulation? We advocate with others that the local is not the “place of miracles” for the educational problems that the center cannot solve. The local will be mainly the new center of the problems in this deep erratic and undefined frame and with no public space, in which decentralization and territorial policy of education is steeped.