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Educational Evaluation. Simais. AGEE. Potiguar Education Management.
Educational evaluation occupies a central position in educational policies of the past two decades, constituting a basic recommendation of an educational agenda, promoted globally by International Organizations (IOs). Thus, in Brazil, as in the case of other countries, educational evaluation systems were implemented both at the national level and in the states of the federation. Rio Grande do Norte was one of the last in the Northeast region to implement, in 2016, its own system: the “Sistema Integrado de Monitoramento e Avaliação Institucional (Simais)”. This system is part of the context of administrative reform in the potiguar State, financed by a loan from the World Bank, one of the main promoters of the Globally Structured Agenda for Education (AGEE). Thus, the objective of this research was to analyze the process of formulating and implementing of “Sistema Integrado de Monitoramento e Avaliação Institucional (Simais)”, as part of a Globally Structured Agenda for Education and administrative reform in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, in the educational scope. For this, the historical-critical approach was used, seeking to understand Simais based on the critical analysis of its historical development. The research is also situated in the perspective of the evaluation of public policies as social research, with a focus on understanding the processes of policy formulation and implementation as a collective, purposeful and planned effort by public and private agents. As research procedures, bibliographic review, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with state education secretary managers were undertaken. This study showed that the policies that guide the country's education are the result of the action of several agents, both local and external. In this sense, we highlight the influence of International Organizations (IOs) in promoting the Globally Structured Agenda for Education, which imposes educational priorities, to a large extent, assumed by local elites. In this perspective, the formulation and implementation of Simais, as part of the management reform of public administration in Rio Grande do Norte, financed by the World Bank, lends the system an economicist and managerialist perspective, aiming at reducing expenses, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of educational services. The system was formulated by an educational consulting company, with a low level of participation by professionals working in schools, in order to articulate assessment of professional, institutional and learning performance. Its implementation, however, combined the assessment of learning with data from contextual questionnaires, applied to students, teachers and management teams of schools, regional directories and the secretariat. The results of the evaluation are restricted to school managers and professionals, instituting soft policies of professional accountability, in accordance with the conceptions of local managers.