Considering the organization of the National Congress established since the 1988 Federal Constitution, the present work has as its purpose to investigate the role of the Legislative Power in the formulation of curriculum policies in Brazil, highlighting and discussing the agenda proposed within the sphere of that Power for the matters concerning this issue. To such end, all proposals about education presented and concluded in their legislative process during the 50th, 51st, and 52nd legislatures (1995-2007) were identified and, among these, those that took school curricula as their subject matter. In this way, the work analyzes the legislative process followed by 29 proposals about school curriculum, three of which eventually became legal norms. The conclusion was that the Legislative exerts little power to set the agenda for curriculum policies, limiting its proposals to the creation or modification of school disciplines. In the conception of curriculum policy expressed in the proposals presented it is as if the school curriculum was formed from the outside of the schools through the incongruous summation of disciplines supposedly relevant to minimize social flaws. The proposals do not seem to derive inspiration from the objectives germane to the school institution, but from the social problems themselves. They disregard the context of the practice, revealing procedures in which the text of the curriculum policy seems to make sense in itself, outside the processes of recontextualization and hybridism that are fundamental to understand curriculum policies as cultural policies.
Educational policy; Curriculum policies; School disciplines; Legislative Power; Educational legislation
