The Centaur of educational policy: conditions for innovation in the high school reform in São Paulo, 2019-2022

Abstract This paper analyzes the implementation of the high school reform in the State of São Paulo, focusing on the Inova Educação program, a curricular component of all the formative itineraries of the New High School, in the period 2019-2022. The methodology used is participatory research with the Public School and Democracy Group (GEPUD), which brings together communities from 15 state schools in the São Paulo network, five case studies, interviews with educators and analysis of content proposed by private agents formulating the program. Based on Gramsci’s concept of the State (2014), community participation in the decision-making process of the policy cycle and changes in the material conditions of schools are considered mediating elements in the analysis of this educational policy. The exclusion of community input, alongside a performative invitation to participate in institutional spaces of the Department of Education, in which the communities attended the presentation of the program by private agents, without the right to express their opinion, stand out; the precarious context of the implementation of the reform that affects the right to education of students with the low supply of classes in the formative itineraries, in addition to the exclusion of scientific and humanistic knowledge necessary for understanding and overcoming social problems. The anti-democracy that constitutes the program is represented by the spoken and unsaid content of the educational policy: what is proposed by its formulators and what was experienced by the communities of the schools participating in the research. In this sense, we seek to indicate that the problem of the reform of high school did not consist only in its implementation, but lies in its conception.