The role of assessment in the digital public school educational sistem. A tol that promotes control or emancipation?

Abstract

During the last thirty years, the government of the Province of San Luis has been implementing neoliberal educative policies that imply a movement of the State toward privatization in economy. Within this frame, discourses and practices of assessment have been a tool for regulation that gives place to a new configuration of practices closer to control than to democratic assessment. The last “educational reform” was implemented in order to provide answers to the new requirements of the “society of knowledge” by proposing a Digital Educational System. In this proposal, evaluation deepens control mechanisms; for this reason, the focus of this work is on the analysis of the assessment practices proposed in public digital schools. To this end, the role of evaluation will be analyzed in two dimensions: the first one is the role of the State in the assessing of the project, analyzed by unraveling discourses and assessment practices the provincial State carries out in order to legitimize economic decentralization in education. The second dimension refers to practices of student assessment proposed in these schools, rooted on excellence and personalized teaching, both discourses that mask learning practices centered on accreditation, where the aim is to inform the subject, leaving aside the formative dimension of the students, and pushing them away from collective senses that promote emancipation practices.