Historical conditions for the existence of the educational quality verified by the large-scale assessments

Abstract

Based on the centrality of large-scale evaluations of educational policies aimed at basic education in Brazil, the article seeks to present the political-discursive arrangement that underpins the emergence of “educational quality” as an object apprehensible through standardized assessments of educational networks. Sustaining the objective of scrutinizing the existing affinities between a powerful discourse in the educational agenda: the educational quality, based on the large-scale evaluations given that it is possibly in this coexistence that the object of educational quality, positivized through evaluations, emerges as a discursively possible object and politically relevant. Based on the methodology of bibliographical research and literature review, the text uses a poststructuralist approach based on the writings of Michel Foucault, directed to the official discourse and to the academic statements, in the search of historicizing the present, elucidating the epistemic and political anchorages that inscribe the object “educational quality” currently, in other words, present the devices that make the contemporary discourse of quality possible and politically incisive. Statements, or even objects of discourse, institute battlefields, in which forces are tactically ordered in the struggle for the imposition of meaning. It concludes that, in this vein, the official quality discourse entails a clear political bias, overshadowed by a pretended objectivity, operated by specific verdict rituals, such as large-scale external evaluation. The fabrication of the object educational quality as performance in standardized tests, refers to the interdiscursive field, whose statements provide it with anchor points and minimize or obfuscate its inconsistencies.