School Managers and School Trajectories in Educational Institutions in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

This study analyzes the role of school administrators in combating inequalities within basic education institutions. The research focuses on the process of grouping carried out through enrollment in public high schools in Rio de Janeiro, and whose methodology is based on in-depth interviews with school administrators represented by the people who serve as high school principals in the public education system of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The interviews were carried out using a snowball selection method and allowed us to capture school principals strategies for creating an effective school that promotes educational opportunities for students, one of them through class transfers. In this study, those school principals are understood as street-level bureaucrats, as they are directly responsible for implementing the public enrollment policy inside of which the transfers are. Through the theoretical framework regarding the importance of school leadership and school climate for building an effective school, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of public high school principals in Rio de Janeiro through strategies for moving students within the school institution. This movement of students within the school system is known as class transfers, in which part of them are the prerogative of the school principal to carry them out. Preliminary results indicate that school managers seek to build a democratic and inclusive school through the possibility of student transfer, while their actions indicate discretionary, and sometimes selective and stigmatizing social processes. Thus, this study does not intend to exhaust all possibilities of analysis, but to include class transfers as an object of analysis to understand the internal functioning of the school institution and the role of school principals in the formation of a fair school in combating inequalities in schools trajectories.