Mass measurements: a political production of meanings on educational systems

Abstract

This article includes reflections resulting from documentary reviews and discussions with teachers and experts in educational evaluation. This has allowed us to transcend the understanding of evaluation from a technical practice to a political practice produced from a world view that legitimates and installs certain meanings on the educational systems and their actors, generating specific forms of relationship and organization that produce exclusion. In this perspective, we analyze some of the meanings produced by mass measurement practices that, presented as a technical practice, obviate the discussion of the worldviews, the conceptions and the evaluations from which they are produced. There are discussed concepts about evaluation, the assessed knowledge, recognized cultures and the processes of exclusion generated by these practices, as well as their effects on institutions and persons. It is concluded that the tests are inventions of the twentieth century, and that there have not been discussed the pedagogical and technical problems they conceal; but especially, there have been ignored their implications in terms of quality and equity and their political role in the reproduction and legitimation of differences.