Gestão municipal da educação: lógicas de sobrevivência e de desenvolvimento estratégico

The connection between Development and Education is the thematic of this article which presents an analysis of the Educational Charters’ of the nine municipalities from the North of Beira Interior –NUT III, aiming to investigate the representations, tensions and trends from the proposals presented in these documents. An idea stands out: the urgency of the problems makes the municipal action be located between the setting of survival and the implement of strategies ensuring the minimum stability for the future. The main tensions were defined in two keywords which are part of the title: survival and strategy. We are facing a situation where land problems are indeed no longer dependent on its direct interveners who frequently only but lessen and solve pre-disruptive or disruptive situations, (especially the demographic ones). However, we consider that only through more global policies (local, national and foreign policies, namely from EU) that value these inland territories together with supportive public services, praising the close relationships and positively discriminating these areas, one will manage to reverse these trends and simultaneously, solve both problems: the Interior, by a ‘repopulation’ and improvement of its competitive apports and the Coastland that suffers from an excessive concentration of people, being therefore less crowded and more manageable. Within this context, we will consider the action of the municipalities in the educational field: on the one hand, they seek to guaranty the minimum surviving levels of their citizens’ services, and on the other hand, to scheme strategies that let them envision a ‘window of hope’ to reverse the course of events.