This thesis proposes a sociological investigation of reformism and management in education. The object of research is the reception of managerial reforms in Brazil and their assimilation in the field of education. To pursue it, the first effort is to conceive a sociological perspective that allows us to contextualize the reformism in question, based on a broader discussion about the relationship between education and the State and society and its transformations throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Right away, we intend to surround it, on the one hand, with the analysis of the incorporation of managerial ideas in public educational policies implemented in the first decades of the 2000s by state governments in the country, more specifically the cases of Ceará and Minas Gerais and, on the other hand, with the examination of its representation in the Brazilian academic debate on education management. This last aspect is explored through an extensive investigation of the main authors and works of training courses in educational and school management in the country. With this, it was possible to identify the core of the bibliography in the field of education management, making it visible that two distinct strands prevail, with little dialogue between them. As a whole, the thesis supports the hypothesis that education reform in Brazil has benefited little from a public debate that mobilizes more responsive attention from academia and sociology, in particular. And that this gap, in some way, compromises our ability to place the concrete challenges of public school at the center of the debate, which certainly go far beyond what managerial imagination and its criticism have been capable of contemplating.