Teachers Council in a Top Rated School

This research is aimed to understand the judgments made about students during the teachers council in a top rated private school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In our country, below average grade students are always evaluated by Teachers Councils before the end of each term. These collective assessment meetings are exceptionally adequate places to perceive, through the agents’ speeches, how the school classification system is produced and reproduced. That’s where we can observe the structure of hierarchies of proprieties to reproduce and, therefore, the “choices” made by the system (Bourdieu). In public schools, where most of the students belong to low middle class families, judgments made in this context are predominantly moral, therefore more social than academic. Learning problems are considered as been originated outside of the school. Students' personal dramas influence grades, their families are also subject to judgment. Teachers’ work is not part of the debate, teaching strategies that promote learning are not discussed, which ultimately leads to school failure. The institution investigated attends middle to upper class students and has been evaluated as one of the best schools in Brazil after several national assessments. How would be the trial in an institution where the student body is already selected socially? It was observed that the evaluation criterion has an academic origin, but the criterion is not strictly academic. Disposition’s considered fundamental at schools of excellence are: docility and academic aptitude (Bourdieu). The social selectivity in this school is a distinctive selectivity. Cutting class will operate in the kind of attitudes towards school, and the possibility of ascension through school. The student desired profile is the middle class one, whose families adhere more easily to the school values, since they have the cultural goodwill as Bourdieu defined.