The principal’s work in the school context and the educational results in six public schools in the Federal Distric
School management. Leadership. Educational results. External evaluation
The present research considered the Brazilian School Evaluation System (Saeb) and the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB) to understand the manager's relationship with the external evaluation data received by their school units. To this end, we investigated the pedagogical practices of the principals of six early-year school units of the public school system located in the region of Taguatinga, which showed progressive improvement in the Ideb in 2015, 2017, and 2019, to verify how the work of the principal occurs and whether there is a relationship between the results of large-scale assessments and the use of educational data by the unit's manager. The research, guided by the qualitative method, had as its methodological procedure the execution of semistructured interviews with members of the management, the monitoring of the routine of one of the managers (shadowing), and the analysis of documents. In addition, it was based on a bibliographic review of the theme. This work sought to track, by the performance of the management team, signs that the use of external evaluative data might be favoring the learning results expressed in the Ideb since the units under investigation had been showing an upward trend in the index. It was possible to notice that, although the data from the large-scale evaluation are already part of the school units' routine, the use of external evaluative data occurs in an incipient and unsystematized way, concluding that it is reductionist to say that the mobilization for the utilization of external data provided the growth of the Ideb in the years investigated. However, it was found that the more frequent the learning monitoring and the closer the manager is to this monitoring, the greater the possibilities of harvesting better pedagogical results. Focusing on aspects pointed out by managers as limiting the use of data, the technical product proposes the development/improvement of strategies that contribute to better data use.