As políticas públicas de avaliação do ensino superior e o trabalho docente no Centro de Educação da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo : sinais da ditadura ou a ditadura do SINAES

Abstract

In the past few decades in Brazil, public assessment policies have shown similarities and differences in their positions. That is why they have a fundamental role in the creation of a higher education system. In order to get to know this reality better, this study aims at understanding the impacts of the public assessment policies on the work of professors at the Education Center at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Ufes), Brazil, from 1970 to 2000. The theoreticalmethodological approach was outlined based on an analysis from the perspective of Dialectical and Historical Materialism as a method that allows going into the root of our problem, that is, unveiling the laws that produce them through both the contributions by Marx and those by other authors who share the same notion. The dialogue between the theoretical questions and what the author experienced allowed us to understand, through interviews and documental analyses, the relationships built around this assessment process and the teaching work in the university sphere. From this dialogue, four categories have arisen.The first category (precarization of the teaching career and contradictions of teachers’ work) allowed us to understand that the teaching career has been marked by a precarization process that results from multiple factors, among them, reduction of funding from the state and consequent decrease in salaries and loss of their isonomy. The second category (suffering, alienation and resistance produced by assessment policies for professors’ work at the Education Center at Ufes) showed that, after the implementation of the public assessment policies PARU, Provão and Sinaes, the work of professors has become a product sold according to market logic. It also showed us many types of resistance that produced advances and throwbacks in the history of assessment; and that all the teachers are aware of the importance of their participation in public assessment policies. The third category (signs of the old Brazilian Dictatorship or the dictatorship of “Sinaes” in professors’ work) revealed that even though President Lula’s government had a“democratic” speech, it implemented the National System for Higher Education Assessment (Portuguese acronym: Sinaes) as a public assessment policy based on a model of practice typical of military dictatorship, guided by a productivistnotion that prioritizes efficiency and efficacy. The fourth category (academic productivism and the process of devaluation of undergraduate professors) described how academic productivism takes place in the Education Center, as well as how overvaluation of postgraduate professors take place to the detriment of undergraduate ones.Based on the analysis of the categories above, we were able to corroborate this hypothesis according to which, the Brazilian federal government’s public assessment policies affect professors’ work directly and weaken the university's autonomy and commitment to the project of transforming society. Thus, the analysis highlights predictors for us to think about ideologies that involve public assessment policies in higher education and the devaluation process of professors’work at the Education Center at Ufes.