Paradigms and cognitions in the field of educational administration: from policies of evaluation to evaluation as politics | Paradigmas e cognições no campo da administração educacional: das políticas de avaliação à avaliação como política

Abstract

In the last two decades, the mechanisms and instruments of evaluation have acquired an increasing importance in the field of educational administration. Since they cannot be dissociated from the process of erosion of the educative State, the current mechanisms of evaluation do not propose themselves only as more efficient mechanisms of regulation, considering that they are supported by a more detailed knowledge of the field. This article admits that evaluation produces the field that it evaluates, and proposes an analysis of the main tendencies in the constitution of this field, situated on the political, cognitive and institutional levels. In the political sphere, the text comments on the process of disqualification of the contextualized political debate and the unprecedented affirmation of an book keeping definition of education, in which the work of decontextualization and the reflection on the efficiency of the means are emphasized above all else. On the cognitive plane, the text debates the knowledge and lack of knowledge produced by the evaluation designed to emphasize the reification of the educative persons and their relations, who are thus deprived of their specific educative qualities. On the institutional plane, the text emphasizes both the processes of production of new institutional figures as well as the processes of redistribution of social responsibilities for the failures of schooling. It concludes by making explicit some frameworks that are susceptible to configuring an alternative paradigm that, by not being normative, is concerned with the rehabilitation of the lack of knowledge produced by the paradigm of evaluation, valuing, above all, the epistemological, institutional and cognitive mediations.