Abstract

This study analyzes discursive strains arising from the transfer of school management from municipalities to local public education services, following the implementation of the New Public Education system in Chile (Law 21,040 of 2017). This article examines accounts from local school stakeholders involved in implementing the reform in their regions. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and employing tools from systemic-functional linguistics, this article describes semantic and dialogic variations to understand how discursive practices regarding the change in administration and school management are represented and positioned. Findings suggest a persistent tension between management focused on administrative and financial matters and a critical voice demanding that it be refocused on pedagogy as the organizing principle of the public sphere. In this sense, “participation” emerges as a pivotal category that articulates the administrative-financial with the pedagogical, by contesting what is considered “key” and who has the agency to decide. The study offers empirical evidence, through a critical discourse analysis, that participation grounded in pedagogy constitutes a condition of possibility for reorienting school management toward educational, inclusive, and public goals, in a context strained by technocratic and neoliberal rationalities