A Avaliação Externa de Escolas na perspetiva dos Coordenadores de Autoavaliação

Abstract

In Portugal, Schools External Evaluation is established in Law no. 31/2002 of 20th  February, having been implemented from 2005/06, by the General Inspection of Education and Science. This model constitutes itself as an identifier of good organizational, procedural and pedagogical practices of the educational institutions. It intends to create a lasting and systematic culture of quality and improvement by creating levels of efficiency and efficacy that enable the contextualization and interpretation of the results to accomplish credibility and success in the education system.  Schools External Evaluation (SEE) comes framed in national and international educational policies that support the legitimacy of the concept of evaluation placing accountability, quality, improvement, efficacy, efficiency and results as main objectives of the evaluation of institutions. In this context a question arises: What are the consequences of SEE in the perspective of school self-evaluation coordinators of Portugal’s northern region?. To understand the concept of evaluation we resorted to the analysis of different definitions and the content analysis of the interviews of self-evaluation coordinators of school clusters (n=2) in the northern region of Portugal, based on the evaluation prospective of Nevo (2007) that considers it comprehends five functions: decision making, improvement, accountability, professionalism and certification. Through the analysis of the interviews we found a correlation between SEE and the functions acknowledged by Nevo (2007), since it is a process that legitimizes the decision-making of the intermediate leaders of educational institutions looking for improvement and holds responsible various actors certifying, at the eyes of society, organizational, pedagogical and curricular practices carried out by schools. The data point to the recognition of the importance of the educational context and the work done by the self-evaluation coordinators. This communication it’s inserted on an investigation project called “School External Evaluation on the non-higher education” (FCT – PTDC/CPE-CED/116674/2010) led by Minho’s University.