Can Education Challenge Neo-Liberalism? the Citizen School and the Struggle for Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil‪.‬

Introduction In this article, we want to situate the processes of educational policy and reform in their larger socio-political context. We describe the profound impact on local communities of a set of policies that are linked to larger dynamics of social transformation and to a coherent strategy aimed at empowering the impoverished and marginalized. In describing and analysing the policies of the 'Popular Administration' in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we focus specifically on the Citizen School and on proposals designed to radically change both the municipal schools and the relationship between communities, the state and education. This set of policies and their accompanying processes of implementation are not only constitutive parts of an explicit project aimed at constructing a better school for the excluded, but also of a larger project of radical democracy. The reforms being carried out in Porto Alegre, we argue, have crucial implications for how we might think about the politics of education policy and its dialectical role in social transformation.