Among the educational policies from the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo, this paper assesses the guidelines that gave pedagogical, administrative and financial autonomy to the network of schools. The official discourse is analyzed on the base of both the main documents that justified the political options to formulate the agenda of the Department and clarified its goals, between 1983 and 1999, and the legal measures taken to regulate the process that granted autonomy and decentralization to that schooling network.
Assessment of educational policies; Administration; Autonomy; Decentralization