CULTURE, MANAGERIALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN STATE SCHOOLS

Scientific research of the last twenty years about school's culture highlights as a dominant feature the adoption of a rational managerial, based on the belief that integrating cultures promote school's excellence, efficiency and competitiveness. This ideology - that is also present in the global educational policy agenda - has underpinned some measures to reform state schools. The aim of this article is to discuss wheter or not the managerial use of culture may have implications on leadership processes and on school's democratic development. The methodology of this article is the examination of of a sample of 239 School External Evaluation Reports produced in Portugal between 2006 and 2009. The main objective was to understand the implicit models of school's culture and leadership promoted by the evaluation commission and its implications for the reconfiguration of everyday school life. In conclusion, we aim to examine to what extent the managerial policy agenda has been disseminated throughout the academic community and in the actual contexts of educational work, namely in the reconstruction of school (organisational) cultures, in the reconfiguration of leadership profiles and in the correlated development of democratic practices.