Fiscal austerity, authoritarianism and educational policy: legislative changes in the democratic management of the school system and the public school of Mato Grosso

This text presents and analyzes part of the mapping started in Mato Grosso that modified the state legislation related to the democratic management of the public school. Changes that do not find fertile ground in a democratic rule of law, but emerge in a context of deepening neoliberal and neoconservative measures that have gained space, mainly, from 2016 after the impeachment, or coup d'etat, that removed the president. After this, in the name of employment, growth and economic stability, they reproduce and expand discourses that invoke the constitutional revision (Amendment 95/2016), labor and social security reforms. Pedro Taques (2015-2018), governor of the State of Mato Grosso, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) has been deconstructing the principles of democratic management, guaranteed by the constitution, through a set of legislative measures that disregard them. The method adopted for analysis crosses information from the period 2016 to 2018, collected on official websites of the state of Mato Grosso, and documentary data confronted with discourses and motivations of the main actors involved in the alteration of state politics, analyzed on the bases of reference theoretical-critics that approach the theme State, society and education in the context of neoliberal (re) updating. In the end, we discuss the relationship between the corrosion of the constitutional principle of democratic management in state public schools and the most virulent return of old and authoritarian political forms in the country.