Escola Pública e Segmentos Populares em um Contexto de Construção Institucional da Democracia

This article's basic premise is that the main challenge for Brazilian public schools is to redefine the terms of their relationship with the community, from the prevailing asymmetric and paternalistic pattern to an egalitarian and equitable one. This institutional challenge has been raised by a research agenda on the relationship between public schools and the students' world , including their families and neighborhoods. The article presents an analysis of data from a surveywith the schoolchildren's parents and guardians, nearly all of whom were slumresidents. Based on a reading of the data,we reflect on the school's value for low-income communities and how this points to a horizon of conflicts in the school's context. To deal with this scenario from the school administration's perspective, we draw on the notion of responsiveness from the sociology of law, which allows conceiving ways of turning expectations of social mobility and access to the city into greater institutionality and more democracy