The pernambuco educational evaluation: modernization through the logics of fantasy

Abstract

This article is an extract from broader research carried out at the Public Policy, Curriculum and Teaching Research Laboratory at the Federal University of Pernambuco. By understanding the educational field as a political field, we problematize the educational evaluation used by the public school system in Pernambuco, anchored in the post-structuralist political ontology formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2019) with the approach proposed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2018), focusing on the logics of fantasy, or phantasmatic. In this extract, our objective is to expose the precarious and contingent reasons by which evaluative regimes and practices of the Pernambuco educational system, can (or cannot) adhere to individuals. We work with discursive objects and conditions that make standards or routine articulations possible in view of the hegemony of the educational evaluation proposed by the Program for the Modernization of Public Management - Goals for Education in Pernambuco. Our results point to the existence of mythical discursive constructions that intend a hegemony over the meaning of what constitutes the function of the school, quality of teaching, and curricular production. The ideological control over the discourse of Pernambuco's educational evaluation has offered a narrative of plenitude, operating on the promise to cover the constitutive lack. However, what it promises to supply is what it reproduces, perpetuating the subject's condition of desire.