O IMPACTO DA CONCORRÊNCIA DE MERCADO NA QUALIDADE DO SERVIÇO EDUCACIONAL

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate the fragile relationship between internal and external assessments of the quality of school services and the intertwined relationship between market pressure and the quality of educational services, based on the assessment processes of educational services offered by four units of the Adventist Educational Network located in the region of [...].
The proposals are based on the results of the master's research entitled [...], published in the annals of [...]. In this analysis, we call internal quality assessment the one carried out by the institution itself or by its sponsor, using standardized indicators validated by the organization itself, chosen as suitable for checking and measuring quality in light of corporate objectives; while we consider external assessment the one that expresses the perception of the client or service recipient, with data collected from opinion polls using an instrument already validated in the literature and widely used in this type of verification. Assuming that the school is a rich and complex space for learning and coexistence, where the principal's performance can be decisive for the success or failure of school objectives, we also checked, in a secondary way, the impact that the evaluation of the school manager's performance has on the client's perception regarding the final quality of the service provided by the school.

This is not a study on the quality of education or the various concepts that orbit this theme, but on the way in which the client's perception and the institution itself qualify the same service, considering the convergences and divergences of the results between both evaluations as well as the expectations of both agents.

The school is a space of diversity where a multiplicity of expectations and interests meet, which makes the conceptualization and verification of quality a challenging task, where market competition exerts an important influence on the formulation of the concept and the perception of quality, in addition to dictating both the pace and the direction of the transformations experienced in the competitive educational market in Brazil, despite public policies.

Considering that individuals in the school community, governments and institutions have their own concepts of educational quality, it is the school principal's responsibility to evaluate the service. In order to meet market expectations, the school administrator finds himself at the center of a dilemma where institutional values ​​and customer expectations clash, often leading him to assume a more political than administrative stance. Considering the pressures exerted on schools, it is worth reflecting on how important the influence of competition is on the quality of the services offered, since the survival of the business depends on its positioning in the market.