Privatização do transporte escolar no município de Uberlândia/MG

Abstract

This research is part of the Research Line State, Educational Policies, and Educational Management of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia. Its object of study is the public policy of school transportation in the municipality of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Based on the understanding of school transportation as an instrument for guaranteeing the right to education, the study aimed to analyze the organizational strategies adopted in this policy, seeking to identify the convergences and divergences of privatization mechanisms embedded in its structure and implementation between 2015 and 2025. The research is grounded in Historical-Dialectical Materialism as its epistemological framework and adopts a qualitative approach, combining bibliographic and documentary research procedures. The theoretical framework draws on the contributions of Dardot and Laval, Wendy Brown, Adrião, and Peroni to understand the relationships among neoliberalism, the reconfiguration of the State, the economization of public policies, and the privatization of educational management. This epistemological framework guided the analysis of the contradictions identified in the documentary corpus, while the theoretical references made it possible to interpret contemporary forms of neoliberal rationality and their implications for the organization of school transportation. The investigation was conducted through a systematic and interpretative reading of the selected documentation, seeking to identify recurring patterns, regularities, tensions, and transformations in the strategies adopted throughout the period under analysis. The analytical axes were constructed by articulating the recurring themes identified in the documents with the theoretical framework, allowing for an understanding of the contradictions that permeate this public policy. The findings demonstrate that the privatization of school transportation extends beyond the transfer of service provision to private actors, also manifesting itself through the incorporation of economic criteria into policy implementation. The study identified the persistence of outsourcing as a structural characteristic of the service, accompanied by the expansion of accreditation mechanisms, individualized contracting, and contractual flexibility, particularly from 2023 onward. The predominance of cost-effectiveness (economicidade) in the analyzed documents highlights the centrality of economic rationality in the organization of school transportation. The findings also reveal the progressive transfer of operational risks to contracted service providers, approximating Wendy Brown's concept of sacrificial citizenship. It is concluded that the school transportation policy in Uberlândia expresses a simultaneous process of exogenous privatization, characterized by the expansion of private actors' participation in service provision, and endogenous privatization, marked by the incorporation of market principles into public administration. This process demonstrates that neoliberalism reconfigures the role of the State without removing it from this policy, but rather reorganizes its action according to principles of cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and contractual flexibility, thereby creating tensions in the realization of the right to education.