Beyond the score: governance, performativity, and the territorialization of specialized artistic education in Portugal

This article presents an in-depth critical policy analysis of Specialized Artistic Education (SAE) in Portugal, interrogating the dialectic between centralised governance and the rhetoric of curricular autonomy. Situated within the discourse of neoliberal educational reform, the study employs Ball’s concept of ‘performativity’ and Amartya Sen’s ‘Capability Approach’ to evaluate whether recent legislative frameworks, specifically Decree-Law No. 55/2018 and Order No. 229-A/2018, enable or inhibit substantive pedagogical freedom. While national discourse champions territorialization and flexibility, our analysis reveals a governance model where autonomy is often circumscribed by performative accountability mechanisms, transforming schools into sites of fabrication rather than genuine innovation. Through a comparative examination of different regions of Portugal, utilizing data from PORDATA and DGEEC, we argue that the capacity to convert legal autonomy into educational well-being is heavily contingent upon regional conversion factors such as institutional density, economic infrastructure, cultural capital, and the pedagogical habitus of the teaching staff itself. Juxtaposing these policy realities with the philosophical tenets of music education advanced by Reimer, Elliott, Small, and Green, we conclude that genuine equity in arts education requires shifting from a resource-based metric to a capability-based framework that values context-specific artistic doings and beings.