Introduction

Result-based regulation, present in the current policies of public education management in Brazil, is characterized by the emphasis on quality, in-synch “[...] with the variable dynamic of the process of socioeconomic reproduction” (^{Mészáros, 2011}, p. 110). Evidence of managerial principles, broadly disseminated in the last three decades, can be perceived in the national documents aiming to build consensus on the public policies to reach the quality proved in results, according to the goals established by the State.

On the one hand, general references to ensure a quality standard are identified in art. 206, section VII, from the 1988 Federal Constitution (FC) (Brasil, 1988), with correspondences in the Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (LDB - Law of Directives and Bases of National Education) - Law n. 9.394, from December 20, 1996 -, in its. 3^rd article, section IX (Brasil, 1996). On the other hand, the education quality improvement is one of the central objectives of Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE- Education National Plan) from 2001 - Law n. 10.172, from January 9, 2001 (Brasil, 2001) -, while in the current PNE (2014-2024) - Law n. 13.005, from July 25, 2014 (Brasil, 2014) -, education quality improvement is the theme’s identifying expression.

Undoubtedly, the concept of quality education from the hegemonic perspective, in consonance with the logic imported from the private initiative, has gotten stronger in Brazil. When displacing the attention of the process to the results, management has been placed strategically to guarantee that the efforts will be channeled to produce results, following the current standard of quality. One result of this management logic in public education is the broadly disseminated understanding that problems in management are fundamentally technical, highlighting the concept of governance to characterize a new management form.

The World Bank (WB), a powerful representative of this hegemonic perspective, is situated here as a collective private sector subject that disputes the content and direction of public education policies and tends to occupy a determinant space in the context in which result-based regulations and governance emerge. As a “political-individual actor” (^{Pereira, 2014}), “[...] this strange type of bank has always explored the synergy between loans and economic thought to increase its influence and internationally institutionalize its policy agenda” (Pereira, 2014, p. 79). This scenario seems to give the agency a greater margin to be considered a representative of global interests and, thus, have a prominent role in governance issues and education worldwide, as is the case of quality.

Faced with a scenario that prioritizes the production of results and its repercussions in national policies, this article analyzes the connections between Brazilian basic school management from 2010 to 2018 and the result-based regulation defended by the World Bank. Therefore, it analyzes the links between the WB prescriptions identified with the production knowledge and the result-based regulation and Brazilian educational policies after the 2000s.

The research procedures encompass a theoretical-conceptual review and the analysis of two national documents in the period¹, taken as critical education policy measures in Brazil: the Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE) 2014-2024 and the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC). Arguing that the WB proposals for basic education management are followed in the mentioned policy documents, the analyses consider that such circumstances do not erase antagonist forces correlations in result-based regulations and educational management.

National policy measures: connections with World Bank priorities for education

The first policy approached is Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE). The document was approved by Law nº 13.005 on June 25, 2014 (Brasil, 2014). It is composed by 20 goals and 254 strategies that permeate Brazilian education. It is a key national policy measure to guide actions to reach some educational goals in the country.

During an interview with the Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (ANPEd), ^{Saviani (2014a}) stated that PNE is a political-institutional piece that materializes interest under dispute, it needed to effectively ensure to the system the conditions to promote education with the same high-quality level to all Brazilian population. Compared to the 2001 PNE, the 2014 one is smaller, going from 295 goals to 190. About its structure, Saviani (2014b) considers the current plan more fragile due to the lack of diagnosis, which could characterize its situation, limits, and deficiencies, besides offering a base and a justification for the goals. Furthermore, still in the interview for ANPEd, the author points out that “[...] funding and teaching are two vital points, without which the other PNE goals cannot be reached” (Saviani, 2014a, p. 1).

The document expressed the conflicts in its construction while renovating the hopes for the educational field after its extended processing in the National Congress. One of the conflicts that marked the Plan is the dispute between public and private, which refers to the historical period of the 1932 Manifest, the Escola Nova [New School] as the predominant pedagogical tendency in that scenario, and the period when the discussions about the first LDB emerged. Later, the discussions made explicit the conflict between public school defenses versus private schooling.

Nowadays, the public-private relationship, an essential issue in the Brazilian history of education, is clearly a constitutive element of the connection between WB priorities and the national education policy. In recent contexts, such as the 2010s, the clashes occurred more incisively with large corporate groups. According to ^{Saviani (2014a}), this conflict has made the current fight more complex, as the private-section power, translated in the emphasis on market mechanisms, has been increasingly contaminating the public sphere.

Under the New Public Management (NPM) axis, with neoliberal principles and capital globalization, new forms of educational organization and their relationship with education privatization have been recurrent.

About this topic, even though ^{Behring (2018}, p. 52) supports the hypothesis that “[...] there were, in the Labor Party governments, displacements regarding the stricter neoliberal guidelines from the Washington Consensus, implemented in the 1990s [...]”, that is, in the first phase of neoliberalism in Brazil, in essence, as the author highlights, the capital crisis was still answered. Likewise, the policies continued to be guided by the NPM bias. In this direction, ^{Marques, Cabral and Maranhão (2020}, p. 88) as other authors, mentioned a series of actions implemented nationwide.

These are programs of different formats that, in the end, seek to reformulate how public education is managed, aiming at its qualifications. In this perspective, quality education is understood as good results in large-scale evaluation, such as IDEB and PISA, be they national or enacted through particular evaluation systems.

As “[...] the social and class disputes are present within the Plan” (^{Scheibe, 2014}, p. 227), the relationship between public and private is one of the tensions that constitute the PNE 2014-2024 because, when focusing on educational quality, each of the spheres tends to have a concept of quality. In the public sphere and under the perspective of the working class the fight is for a socially-based quality education. From a hegemonic class perspective, quality in the private sphere assumes traces of excellence and efficiency, which can be reduced to indexes, rankings, and scores. This latter concept distances from the former when considering the determinants external to school - such as sociocultural and economic factors, adequate public funding, and central managers’ commitment - as well as internal ones, for instance, pedagogical work organization and school management; school projects; schools’ interlocution with families; respect to the differences and dialogue as a basic premise; and the collaborative work involving collegiate and school councils (^{Silva, 2009}).

The interests under dispute and constitutive of the Plan are not summed up to the concept of quality but would establish the field of forces through which the bill has passed. Traces of these aspects are recovered by ^{Azevedo (2014}, p. 266) when arguing that “[...] its processing period [almost four years] can also exemplify the multiple and contradictory interests [...]”. About this, when pointing out why the fight for public education in Brazil nowadays has become more complex, ^{Saviani (2014a}, p. 1, our highlights) states that:

Businessmen’s movement has been filling up spaces in the public system via Undime [Education Municipal Managers Association] and Consed [National Council of Education Secretaries], in the Education Council, and the State itself, as shown in the actions of the Movement “Todos pela Educação” [Everyone for Education]. That is also how a significant part of public systems, especially municipal ones, have been dismissing the didactic books distributed for free by MEC [Ministry of Education] and purchasing those from the so-called “education systems,” such as “Sistema COC,” “Sistema Objetivo,” “Sistema Positivo,” “Sistema Uno,” “Sistema Anglo” etc., arguing that these “systems” allow them to increase one point in the IDEB evaluations, which can be understood as these self-appointed “systems” have the know-how to train students to do these tests.

Amidst a context of interests in dispute, the concept of quality is a “concept adrift” (^{Silva; Trindade, 2010}, p. 170), able to enlarge itself to contain new ideas, without disconnecting itself from the context and the correlation of forces of a given time. The 2014 context represented a period of space in dialogue, different from the 2018 context, marked by a destruction project and the denial of scientific thought. The privatizing and neoliberal offensive remained on course, even though the tension between public and private did not stop the collaborative building of the Plan’s proposals.

Without qualifying it, the concept of quality fits in more than one project of education and, consequently, a society project. For instance, in the language of a Private Hegemonic Device (PHD), such as Todos Pela Educação (TPE), which defends the private logic, the impulse to build consensus is in “promoting the quality leap Brazilian basic education needs” (Todos..., 2011, p. 3); “improve the quality standards” (Todos..., 2011, p. 9); “offer a quality education to all” (Todos..., 2011, p. 9); “improve our students’ learning quality” (Todos..., 2011, p. 111).

Apparently, this posture does not seem problematic as it would point out the “concern” to the country’s educational scenario. However, what is not apparent is that, when appropriating the concept of quality TPE conjugates, according to ^{Martins (2013}), demands and proposals for education from the government, the private initiative, and other societal sectors. Furthermore, the TPE structure, which combines a pact among private initiative, third sector, and governments, “[...] contributes to hide conflicts between classes and class fractions, complexifying the understanding of reality, mainly regarding the fine limits between public and private” (Martins, 2013, p. 12). The reconfiguration of these limits integrates ^{Behring’s (2018}) reflections on the debate about the State and capitalism in Brazil nowadays. The author situates the 13 years of the PT [Labor Party] government as a period of slow reform and new measures but not as a moment of substantial ruptures. An underlying concern that continues in this second phase of neoliberalism in Brazil is the intention to prepare the workforce of Brazilian contemporary society through education, in consonance with the current capitalism traces. Hence, when considering the rise of neoliberalism, the logic of result-based regulation, and capital financialization, the quality of education tends to be closer to reaching averages in indexes, as if the numbers could express the level of education quality by themselves. Under this perspective, the context, the intra and extra-school factors, and elements in the teaching-learning process lose importance when determining quality.

Therefore, though having a polysemic character, the concept of quality that takes the lead has been more in sync with the economic goals and, thus, has been transposed to the concept of quality in education (^{Silva, 2009}). In this case, PNE’s Goal 7 raises an alert toward the tone of quality intended for basic education because it directly connects learning improvement to the national averages in the Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (IDEB - Basic Education Development Index). Accordingly, one point of tension at PNE is the link of the concept of quality to indexes, such as IDEB. It gives some clues about the disposition of the hegemonic logic for the emphasis on evaluations and the distance between the concept of quality in education and the social angle. The most significant problem does not lie in the evaluation practice but in the focus on results for the sake of the result, at the expense of the teaching process, and other issues that permeate education, such as the intra- and extra-school factors. ^{Azevedo (2014}, p. 276) reinforces these arguments when pointing out that:

The guidelines for the evaluation system privileged the standardization of results, showing the strong interference in the PNE and in Brazilian education policy in the quality standards established for the market societies, following globalized standards. [...] In this framework, evaluating quality through indexes, such as Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (Ideb), restricts learning to the results, dismissing processes. Similarly, there is a stimulus to reinforce teacher-valuing policies through result-based evaluation and bonuses, a practice that has brought into schools a competition following market elements, according to total quality parameters and has not been showing the expected efficacy.

Another tension point at PNE (2014-2024) resides in the association of certain elements, like education quality and evaluation. The way these elements have been treated in the historical process of Brazilian education policies, this duo can be considered the expression of an entanglement that establishes the production of answers to the WB proposals by a peripheral capitalist country. We should resume here the “counseling” tone presented in the documents of this PHD in light of “[...] a well-functioning regulatory system” (World Bank, 2010), the need to measure performance by evaluation, to seek scores, and, mainly, the opening to broad learning opportunities, reinforcing the monitoring and the evaluation of performance in educational systems (World Bank, 2011a, 2011b).

The content of PNE’s Goal 19 is another point of tension that meets the logic of regulating by results and valuing parameters of Total Quality, besides raising questions about the investigative interest in the management field. This goal discusses democratic management in education. However, it is associated with technical criteria of merit and performance (Brasil, 2014). Situated as a way to carry on an educational project - more identified to the working class or to capital -, it is known that the mastery of management has occupied a strategic position.

On the one hand, the late 1970s and the 1980s were critical moments in favor of the democratization of Brazilian society and, by extension, of school and management. On the other hand, from the 1990s onwards, the scenario was marked by a project of society grounded on neoliberalism. Following the example of management, the concepts of democracy and participation have also been resignified and voided of political connotation because, under the result-based logic, the technical actions and standards that do not lose sight of targets and results are more important. Similarly, it is vital to mention the accountability phenomenon that carries the primordial idea of responsibility, with a more individualized bias, as in the business logic. Situated in the context of reforms guided towards the State’s efficiency and efficacy, here accountability refers to the one operated by the logic of results, whose references are evaluation (external and on a large scale), liability, and responsibility (sanctions and awards), based on certain quality indicators (^{Schneider; Nardi, 2023}). Furthermore, to a certain extent and with the support of this mechanism, “[...] the discourse of public school crisis and failure favored the closeness with the private sphere, transferring the responsibilities to other sectors of society, valuing the role of private initiative, and removing the State’s responsibility for public education” (^{Stênico, 2019}, p. 136).

Alluding to the critical movement that emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century, in which the principle of democratic management prevailed, ^{Dourado (2006}) situated documents as markers for policies and processes. This expectation tone continues when dealing with the 2014 PNE as a Plan that can be the epicenter of educational policies (Dourado, 2014). However, as it is known, the conquests regarding the democratization process share space with the limits of a formal democracy. ^{Abranches, Coutinho, and Azevedo (2020}) corroborate this reading when assuming the concept of democracy from a Gramsci perspective, according to which “[...] there is a contradiction between a perspective of greater popular participation through civil society and a neoliberal project, whose assumption is the guarantee of individual rights and the civil society participation limited to episodic actions” (Abranches; Coutinho; Azevedo, 2020, p. 354).

A closer and shaper reading of Goal 19 raises surprise because the principle of democratic management is mainly associated with observing technical criteria of merit and performance. From a conception of democracy as a process, compliance with such technical criteria of merit and performance clashes against the mechanisms that favor the materialization of democratic management in public education, as is the case of direct election for school principals. The mention of “performance” in the specific goal refers to the concept of quality in business logic, as this is a notable trace in the process of neoliberal emergence in Brazilian educational policies.

Performance is highlighted in the TPE publications, such as the reports De olho nas Metas [Keeping an eye on the goals]. In the 2012 document, for example, the term is reiterated about 30 times, which indicates its relevance as an argument present in the discourse disseminated by this PHD about public education in Brazil. Traces of the power of the argument about students’ performance in evaluations combine with the ideas proposed by TPE regarding PNE (2014-2024). According to this report:

2012 has been a very important year for us due to our advancement in the proposals around a Plano Nacional de Educação (PNE) that reflects the country’s actual needs. The new PNE, which will be in action for ten years, should be one more important document to guide the way toward real independence, which will only be reached when we become a country with no illiterate adults and where all children and young people have the fundamental right of quality education fully ensured. Only then can we have the country we want (Todos..., 2012, p. 5).

Considering the language of collective meaning, the organization shows its “interest” not only in the emerging PNE but also related to education in a broader sense to become “the country we want”. Thus, at first sight, the language in plural seems more like a strategy to eliminate distrust about the alleged interest of the organization to be part of the education policies in the country. However, we should ask: In which concepts of State and Civil Society does TPE support itself? What type of concept tends to restrict the effectiveness of education on students’ test performance? Why does education management continue to be subsumed to the appeal for governance?

The unveiling of the discourses can be facilitated by considering TPE’s business nature, imbricated to the conjecture that gathers a correlation between progressive and liberal ideas. We are faced with a collective subject of the private sector that answers the interests of the capital and seeks to take for itself Brazil’s task to reach five educational goals², which were then foreseen for 2022. If the boldness of constructing rationalities consonant to result-based regulations was not enough, TPE is a collective subject that, as the WB, seeks to transfer to public education the private-sector logic. An example is the symmetry between TPE’s mottos, goals, and discourses and the ideas that establish PNE (2014-2024).

By extension, the symmetries also take place in WB guidelines, in which accountability and school management are a pair of identifying elements because they are part of the production of answers to the agency’s proposals, therefore constituting a connection between WB and national education policies. In this direction, we highlight the relevance of resuming the premise of making schools work relying on new evidence about accountability and reforms (World Bank, 2011c), because the premise affirms itself in the defense of successful practices, the primarily individual accountability, and in models of educational and school management based on technical criteria of merit and performance. This same report published by WB in 2011 brings to light successful experiences, such as one from the state of Paraná, where there was a type of school report card aiming to increase parents’ knowledge about education quality and students’ performance between 1999 and 2002.

Considered “one of the most concrete and clear examples” (World Bank, 2011c, p. 42), the report card presents evaluation scores of classes equivalent to Year 4 and Year 8, characteristics of teachers’ qualifications, promotion rates, retentions, and dropouts. It also had a space for parents’ opinions about information availability, school performance, and activities. The apparent democratic tone of Paraná’s example is misleading because there is an underlying idea in this successful practice that aims to circulate a document among teachers and parents that compares municipal and state averages.

Therefore, WB’s stimuli to produce answers to its proposals is noticeable, highlighting the tone of “helping countries identify priorities for the reform” (World Bank, 2013). Among such priorities is accountability, meaning to assume a result-based responsibility. According to the agency’s perspective, it is normally associated with liability, transparency, sharing of responsibilities, and the possibilities of making schools more democratic by implying autonomy.

In line with this perspective, more accountability systems are necessary and enabled as reforms are undertaken in the educational sector. The case studies that the WB points out as successful suggest the positive impacts of the reforms that aimed for accountability. Among these impacts, the World Bank highlights: “[...] greater collaborations and better communications between parents and teachers, improved parental participation in school matters, better and more frequent data reporting mechanisms, better resource flows, and some suggestion of improved education outcomes” (World Bank, 2011c, p.49).

Observing the connections announced in this analysis that allude to the production of answers to the WB proposal, PNE (2014-2024) content also offers some clues in this direction. According to ^{Nardi (2014}), one of them is the affirmation of evaluation systems as an official way to maintain a certain quality standard, as an emerging sign of a context encompassing NPM and neoliberal globalization (Nardi, 2014). Another point raised in the author’s analysis refers to the approval of a Law of Educational Responsibility foreseen on PNE’s strategy 20.11³ do PNE and that is pointed out as a necessity in the final document of Conferência Nacional de Educação (Conae-Education National Conference) in 2010. As he also approaches normative-legal elements, the author believes that it is possible to infer that “[...] the option around the topic in the legal sphere seem to converge to an accountability model connected to performance goals, focused on external evaluation, a pathway that can increase the pressure over schools and teachers” (Nardi, 2014, p. 289).

Therefore, the entanglement between WB proposals and PNE 2014, as an educational policy measure, can be established concerning education quality and the concept of education management. From the organization bias, the concepts related to quality and management point towards proposals that increasingly consider large-scale evaluations, besides accountability systems that prioritize individual result-based accountability. To this end, the agency reinforces the continuous implementation of reforms among contemporary priorities to ensure strategies consistent with the slogan Learning For All and the learning paradigm.

The second measure of national policy examined here that evidences the conformation to result-based regulations advocated by the WB in the management policy of basic education in Brazil is the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC). In the final version, approved with the inclusion of high school, the presentation text offers evidence that Brazilian political education cares about the guidelines disseminated through time by multilateral bodies (MB), such as the WB. According to the presentation text written by Rossieli Soares da Silva, Minister of Education at the time, learning is a target to be followed restlessly. In this direction, the BNCC would be a complete, contemporary, and essential document to start changes (Brasil, 2018).

At this point, we point out the correlation of some slogans connected to the WB, such as Agenda 2020 and Agenda 2030. In the first case, the reference is the documents that mark the turn of institutional strategy because, since 2011, the focus is no longer Education For All but Learning For All. The rise of learning is supported by the reiterated arguments on the need for reforms, overcoming challenges in educational quality, and accelerating learning. To the WB, education development is changing worldwide, and new skills need to be developed by the workforce due to the demands of this new context.

In the second case, the Incheon Declaration reinforces the objectives assumed by the WB and other MBs to ensure Learning For All from the Agenda 2030. Education is reaffirmed as a public good, a fundamental human right, being the base to guarantee other rights. It also considers that education is essential to peace, tolerance, human fulfillment, and sustainable development (World Bank, 2015).

The official discourse about the Framework highlights that it is the way through which Brazilian students’ basic learning can be ensured, as well as their full development, relying on the ten general skills for Basic Education (Brasil, 2018). Focusing on this language, the definition is that BNCC:

is a document of a normative nature that defines the organic and progressive ensemble of essential learnings that all students should develop during Basic Education phases and modalities, so as to ensure their learning rights and development [...] (Brasil, 2018, p. 7).

Amidst the alleged contributions of the Framework are its alignment with other policies and actions in the federal, state, or municipal scope pertinent to teacher training, evaluation, and elaboration of educational content (Brasil, 2018). As established in the document, BNCC inaugurates a period of new reforms in the Brazilian educational field, for which it is essential to trigger changes. It is the flagship of a new reformist wave, with repercussions in the curricula, pre and in-service training of education professionals, didactic materials, and evaluations.

The most incisive period of this wave can be related to the coup in 2016, “[...] a new type of coup d’état which opened up a new and third neoliberalism moment in the country” (^{Behring, 2018} p. 61). 2016 is undoubtedly a milestone for the country, as it was an extremely unstable sociopolitical period. It was a moment of several popular manifestations, political-partisan, political maneuvers, and an impeachment process that removed a president elected by the Brazilian people from office. According to ^{Santos (2019}, p. 291, our highlights):

After one decade of “wins” for the economy and for the disadvantaged majority of Brazilian society, this project did not sustain itself when faced with the change in the international scenario, marked by the decrease in the commodities prices and the destabilizing actions of its opponents, who involved PT in a legal-media attack, connected to sabotage and political conspiracy in Congress and right-wing forces that, until that moment, composed the partisan group that supported PT government. The result was the 2016 coup d’état, legally disguised as an impeachment, against President Dilma Rousseff and the dismantlement, in a few months, of almost all policies enacted in the 13 years of PT governments, with the return of neoliberal orthodoxy and its known ills.

Furthermore, amidst this complex scenario, the Decree nº 9.203, from November 22, 2017, signed by Michel Temer was issued about “[...] the governance policy of federal, direct, autarchic, and foundational public administration” (Brasil, 2017, p. 1). As such, it was one more ingredient to strengthen the result-based regulation in recent years, after the coup. In its 7^th article, the decree foresees a Comitê Interministerial de Governança (CIG - Interministry Governance Committee), aiming to help the present guide the governance policy of the federal public administration. Among the workgroups that CIG can establish are representative of public and private bodies and entities (Brasil, 2017, p. 1, our highlight). Therefore, we stress here a sign of how the private sector can rely on the state as a mediator to ensure its interests.

In this context, BNCC emerges portraying interest disputes and different concepts of education and societal projects. BNCC defenders and advocates for result-based regulations consider the Framework a necessary element, a beacon to guide the curricula of states and cities nationwide, through which quality and equity would be promoted to ensure the same learning rights to all children and young people. TPE and the Instituto Ayrton Senna (IAS-Ayrton Senna Institute) are examples of collective subjects from the private sector that defend the Framework⁴, arguing that it is an innovation for Brazilian education. For it to be so, they call for all education systems to implement BNCC so that “nobody is left behind.”

From this perspective, innovation encompasses the curriculum and the skills that would embody the so-called learning rights. In the definition offered by the document, competence is “[...] the mobilization of knowledge (concepts and procedures, abilities (cognitive and socioemotional practices), attitudes and values to solve the complex demands of daily life, the full exercise of citizenship, and the work market” (Brasil, 2018, p. 8). To reach the formation of these attitudes and values, the Framework affirms the alignment between this purpose and Agenda 2030.

From the perspective of those who problematize the origin and the development of a document such as the Framework and its content, the appeal to skills is one tension point because they can imply underlying aspects that are intentionally hidden in the official discourse. From a critical perspective, BNCC raises questions due to its content and scope because, as the national curriculum, it tends to be disseminated in the hegemonic discourse as a panacea to several questions in the educational field. ^{Nascimento (2020}, p. 191) reiterates the criticisms of the Framework, as the redeemer of Brazil’s educational problems, when noticing that: “[...]TPE’s actions can be seen in the debates about BNCC during 2017, 2018 and 2019, in the sub-commission debates, and in the production of materials used to support BNCC implementation under business prescriptions”.

Based on the ensemble of evidence presented here, it is possible to say that, amidst the interest disputes, the conflicts between public and private, and the class fight the hegemonic discourse seeks to hide, the result-based regulation logic has been spreading to educational policies. In this movement, it starts to aggregate elements and becomes more complex. In consonance with this hiding strategy, the discourses stress the conformity between learning objectives and PNE - and other official documents; the curriculum innovation expected from the Framework; the guiding expectation for teacher initial and continuous training, as well as the reorganization of didactic material; the concept that BNCC is a political action for a new curriculum policy and also for the Sistema Nacional de Educação [National Education System]; and the relationship between the Framework and the principles of everyday life pedagogy, seeking to consider the understanding of processes, spaces, and times that closer to the students. Preserving the hegemonic interests in Brazilian society, these discourses divert attention to grounding issues and the possible consequences of certain educational policies.

Notes for a conclusion synthesis

Aiming to unveil the entanglements, that is, the relationships between WB’s prescriptions, identified as a production and result-based logic, and Brazilian educational policies in the scenario after the 2000s, this study shows that this link occurs from the concept of quality, presented in the documents with a generic connotation and frequently connected to evaluations and the increasingly blurry limits between public-private relationships.

This entanglement can be glimpsed through the structural conceptions of the documents grouped into two pairs of elements: education quality and evaluation, accountability, and school management. Both pairs present themselves in a context of disputes between public and private and in a historical moment that, on the one hand, re-signifies concepts and deflates them of political connotations and, on the other hand, it carries a logic based on results and neoliberal principles. As a constitutive element of such entanglement, it is worth registering the discourse of public school failure and crisis, which is widely disseminated by agencies such as the WB regarding the educational policies of peripheral capitalist countries such as Brazil.

If the elements mentioned - education quality and evaluation, accountability, and school management - are tension points in the 2014 PNE document, the concept of quality and management are tension points in BNCC because, in the first place, in the case of quality, it expresses the Total Quality connotation. Grounded on a background logic that promotes privatization and weakens public education, BNCC is a clear option for the pedagogy of skills (^{Arelaro, 2018}). Teaching becomes peripheral compared to the learning paradigm that establishes that the subject has to learn alone and forever.

Second, in the case of educational management related to BNCC, though the document explains the term of its version, the Framework also considers the area of educational and school management as a way to carry on its implementation. In fact, as its background knowledge converges towards privatization, followed by the removal of State’s responsibility, this focus also converges to an idea of governance, understood as a new way of ruling (^{Oliveira, 2011}).

The connections, i.e., the entanglements between the agency’s proposals and the national policy measures, are certainly not limited to the aspects explored in this study. However, seeking to reach some conclusive notes, we should resume i) the alignment- between general skills, curricula, teacher training, and didactic material -, is, in fact, a path for the arguments defended by the WB, which can be seen in national documents, such as BNCC, signaling a connection; ii) the counseling tone present in the Bank’s and national documents registers the need to pursue the performance in standardized evaluations as a way to boost learning. Moreover, it is presented as a possibility to ensure a regulation based on results. Another symmetry between the documents that can contribute to perceiving this entanglement is iii) the association between accountability, of a harmful nature, that individualizes responsibility and education/school management.

In the hegemonic perspective, all this is approached as a way to “make schools work” as long as the reforms in the educational system, which permeate several domains - legal frameworks, funding, management, curriculum, teacher training, and didactic material - are continuously promoted. In this direction, accountability can be added to promoting successful practices, followed by liability processes in consonance with the continuous practice of reforms, one of WB’s contemporary priorities. This scenario can be understood as one more symmetry and, in the case of the reforms, as practices aligned to the appeal for governance, efficient management, and result-based, besides converging towards WB’s proposals and national policy measures.