Abstract

Literature on assessment as a social practice highlights how assessment systems can be understood as a way of structuring modern societies, as a means of promoting certain types of hegemonic knowledge, and as mechanisms that shape our views about ourselves (Filer, 2000). As Foucault indicated in 1975 (1991), examinations are among the strongest technologies of discipline, which allow for controlling societies and individuals. In the current context of expansion of neo-liberal models of education both at a European and international level, high-stakes assessment systems as a technology of power have become particularly salient. In the absence of a strong state to govern education, neo-liberal ideologies have transformed these assessment systems into a means of steering the system at a distance through governing by numbers (Grek, 2008), a mechanism that moves the actors of the education system towards a specific direction in terms of what the goals of education are considered to be. But is this a new phenomenon that emerges alongside neo-liberal models of education? Is there any broader landscape where lessons from the past could be drawn for the present? To address these questions the author will present some of the findings of her doctoral thesis, submitted successfully in 2014 to the University of Oxford. The questions that guided this broader study were: • What are the main systems (with their actors, activities and internal relations) and the main interactions between them involved in assessment reform processes in Chile? • How are discourses on assessment produced, how do they circulate in this system, and how does knowledge on assessment relate to power issues? The paper presents findings around four periods of Chilean history of education (1860-1900; 1920-1940; 1965-1985; 1990-2010), each starting with a reform process and allowing enough time for the intended change to take place. On the basis of document analysis and interviews with policymakers and practitioners, it describes and interprets the interaction between attempts at change to curriculum and pedagogy, and high-stakes assessment systems. Among its findings, the study concludes that ideas on and models of assessment are embedded in specific ideologies, perspectives about society and educational projects, which struggle with other discourses to become the canonised repertoire in the system (Even-Zohar, 1990). High-stakes assessment systems both historically and in the present have responded to a functional view of society where individuals have to be distributed in a pre-defined social order. This approach contradicts more emancipatory and egalitarian models of society and education, which have been promoted in different periods and with different names but advocating similar principles, in waves of reform which in many ways resemble those that emerged in European countries. As the high-stakes are on the side of assessment systems, actors in education have tended to follow this direction rather than that of change and reform, generating a vicious cycle where more emancipatory discourses have been kept as marginal. The study offers an opportunity for re-thinking social justice in education in terms of revealing the tensions between different reform attempts and the discourses and ideologies in which they are embedded, and of highlighting the crucial role of high-stakes assessment systems in facilitating or hindering change towards a more emancipatory and egalitarian idea of society and education.