By Jessica Pacheco
What makes a school considered high quality? After all, what is meant by quality? These are some of the questions that guide the research of the History of Brazilian Schooling: Specialized Policies and Discourses (HISTEB) group, coordinated by Professor Natália Gil at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, which focuses on analyzing how the concept of quality in education has been constructed and mobilized in the Brazilian educational context from 1920 to 2020.
In order to demonstrate that the notion of quality is complex and difficult to define, I would like to present some results of my research that resulted in the master's dissertation entitledWhen the popular school attracts the interest of the middle class: the CIEP in Cidreira/RS from 1995 to 1998, defended at the Postgraduate Program in Education at UFRGS in 2025.
In the workplace, I sought to understand the implementation and functioning of a specific CIEP (schools created by Leonel Brizola and Darcy Ribeiro), which, in itself, carries the emblem of "quality schools". The results of the research showed that this CIEP was indeed conceived as a quality school between 1995 and 1998. Its image was positive among the school community. However, when parents and guardians were questioned about the school's daily life, some contradictions emerged. Some of them stated that the institution should adopt a curriculum similar to that of private schools, more rigid, in order to ensure a training considered appropriate for students.
In other situations, although they recognized the school as being of quality, they pointed out that the teaching was weak or insufficient when analyzing the curriculum. Thus, there seems to be a dissonance in the idea of quality attributed by these subjects, which raises the recurring question: what quality are they referring to? What led these parents and guardians to perceive the school in this way? Perhaps here, in this situation, the grandiose architecture, described by critics of CIEPs as an "open-air billboard", contributed to the construction of this image of quality. However, it still seems to be an empty concept, without contours.
Another relevant aspect highlighted by the research was the high rate of school dropout during that period. That is, it was a school that significantly dropped out its students, which, curiously, did not seem to compromise its image of quality. According to this logic, a "strong" school was one that dropped out many students, therefore, of quality. But, then, does being a quality school mean to exclude, classify, and select its students?
Or, is this logic of dropout linked to the maintenance of certain criteria of excellence that, in practice, reinforce existing inequalities? We believe that it is possible to problematize this issue by considering that the school often legitimizes inequalities by transforming social differences into differences in school performance.
We can see that this impasse reveals the complexity that involves the term "quality". In the 1990s, in Rio Grande do Sul, the pursuit of quality in education was a central theme in public debate. However, while the government's discourse pointed to the lack of quality in schools, the school community, on the other hand, recognized the school as being of quality, even though it emphasized the need for improvements.
The fact is that, although there is an attempt to define what quality is, it is a concept that tends to elude definition as it is being explained. In this sense, it is important to ask: what, after all, characterizes a quality school? These questions lead to reflection on how the concept of quality in education has been constituted in the educational context, as well as on the multiple elements involved in this search. It is therefore important to emphasize that we are not always referring to the same meaning when we talk about quality in schools.
Thus, we see that the evaluation of the quality of education is a social construction directly related to the expectations of the subjects. These expectations are structured from their positions in the educational field and in the broader social space, articulating with class belonging and differential accumulation of cultural capital, which guides perceptions, appreciations, and judgments about the school.
In this sense, previous experiences, both individual and family, not only inform these expectations but also contribute to the production and reproduction of certain conceptions of quality.
In other words, when we evaluate whether a school is "good" or not, we mobilize socially constructed ideas that vary according to social class and the life trajectories of the subjects, tending to reproduce existing views in society.
Jessica PachecoShe holds a master's degree in Education from UFRGS.
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Read other essays and articles on education and literature in the column Cities of Letters: Literature and Education in Brasil de Fato.
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This is an opinion piece. The author's views do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the newspaper.