We highlight an unheard-of experience involving the Union of the Public Teaching Workers of Mato Grosso (Sintep-MT), which promotes long term progressist actions, within that State. Under Dante de Oliveira's Government (1994-1998), this Union has been striving to regulate the 1989 constitutional clause that determines a progressive integration of the network of state and municipal schools into a one and only Schooling System. Mechanisms have been created to involve the population that uses public schools (parents and students) in the deliberation and decision about educational policies; these mechanisms have been designed to favour the construction and the widening of the public sphere of rights. The regulation came to nothing and the mechanisms are still to consolidate. Nowadays, this frustrated experience should be resumed in a critical way, with new proposals. The Union is now more experienced and should reopen the process with the intention to achieve it.
Political-pedagogical project; Public policies; State; Unionism; Democracy