A avaliação de desempenho no contexto neoliberal: Uma nova configuração para a profissionalidade do professor?

Abstract

This research investigates the materialisation of neoliberal policies for education through Teacher Performance Evaluation (ADD) in Portugal, designed within the education systems under the justification of bringing improvements to teachers' professional development. Despite this intention, the operationalisation of ADD has produced effects contrary to its original purpose, as observed in the Portuguese context through the constraints and crises affecting the teaching career in various aspects, such as progression, retention, and the understanding of professional identity itself. Thus, the issue explored in this research attempts to understand how teachers have perceived the changes imposed by the regulations that operationalise ADD and the tensions arising from them, which mark their professional trajectories. Accordingly, the overall aim of the work is to investigate how performance evaluation logics, driven by the neoliberal context in education, can shape a new rationality within teaching professionalism. To address this objective, the research was grounded in the phenomenological-interpretative paradigm, based on a qualitative approach consisting of the analysis of secondary data from the project "Fifty Years of Teaching: Factors of Change and Intergenerational Dialogues" (FYT-ID). The empirical corpus comprises 20 semi-structured interviews subjected to content analysis. The research findings reveal a disparity between the idealised ADD and the real ADD, where the former is presented as formative, while the latter reveals a performative dimension characterised by bureaucratic aspects and feelings of injustice. It is evident that teacher evaluation has had severe effects on the teaching profession, as it contributes to the ethical rupture of professionalism, drives the intensification of work, and exacerbates the institutional and social wear and tear of teachers. In light of these circumstances, it was concluded that ADD has been operationalised as a regulatory instrument that tends to distance teaching from its core of autonomy and criticality, while simultaneously reconfiguring teaching professionalism in profound ways.