Datafication in schools: enactments of quality assurance and evaluation policies in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates datafication in schools through an analysis of the enactments of quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policies in Brazil. In doing so, I question how data permeates and changes school environments, school actors’ conduct and their imaginaries. QAE policies encompass large-scale assessments, indicators, rankings and other steering mechanisms, but importantly connect data to quality in education. Here, I analyse the discourses of school actors (principals, coordinators, supervisors, teachers, students and parents) from three Brazilian public schools collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 28). Data manifests in those schools as a technology of government. Schools enact QAE policies in distinct ways, incorporating the idea of governmentality, but also proposing alternative patterns of action.

KEYWORDS:

• Datafication
• quality assurance and evaluation (QAE)
• policy enactment
• schools
• school actors
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for discussing a preliminary version of this paper in the CIES 2018 publication workshop, coordinated by D. Brent Edwards and Sandra L. Stacki. I am very grateful for the thorough comments I received from Sirpa Lappalainen and Janne Varjo, which immensely contributed to the final version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Data is referred as a construct in this article, ‘as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities’ (Ruppert, Isin, & Bigo, 2017, p. 1). It is a ubiquitous term, associated to numbers, statistics, and digitalisation. An object of knowledge as well as an object of power (Ruppert, Isin, & Bigo, 2017), data affects those for whom it is designed and directed (Hardy, 2015).

2. In this paper, I adopted the definition of basic education provided by the International Standard Classification of Education (UNESCO, 2012) despite the fact that Brazilian basic education includes the early-childhood (‘educação infantil’) and high school (‘ensino médio’) levels of education, which are all compulsory in Brazil. In Brazilian terminology, this study concentrates on ‘ensino fundamental’.

3. ANA is applied to all primary public-school students in the second grade; Aneb assesses a sample of low-secondary education students in the fifth and ninth grades and in the third grade in upper-secondary public and private institutions; and Prova Brasil covers all public-school students enrolled in the fifth and ninth grades.

4. IDEB’s targets are aligned to OECD’s PISA (Kauko, Centeno, Candido, Shiroma, & Klutas, 2016). Specifically, no Brazilian state achieved the national targets for IDEB for upper-secondary education in 2017, only 7 of 27 federal entities reached the lower-secondary education targets and 24 states met the IDEB targets for primary education (INEP, 2018). In addition, Brazil’s position in the PISA rankings has remained low since 2000.

5. The research data were gathered within the project ‘Transnational Dynamics in Quality Assurance and Evaluation Politics of Basic Education in Brazil, China and Russia (2014–2017)’, funded by the Academy of Finland (grants nos. 273871 and 307310).

6. The Prova Floripa was administered annually between 2007 and 2016. It was discontinued after the new municipal government took office in January 2017.

7. Santa Catarina had more than 3119 basic education institutions in 2018. The majority were public, under the responsibility of any of the 295 municipalities (53.01%), the state (32.67%) or the federal government (0.04%); only 14.27% were private. Enrolments reached 851993 in 2018. Following the national level pattern, more than 80% of students attended public schools: 52.84% were enrolled in municipal schools, 34.18% in state schools; and 0.08% in federal schools. Private institutions had 12.90% of basic education students in Santa Catarina in 2018 (INEP, 2019a).

8. The characterisation of the schools is limited out of respect for the anonymity of research participants.

9. Some states and municipalities in Brazil adopt performance-based schemes to reward high-performing IDEB of schools. But, the LSAs remain low-stake in Santa Catarina, where a high IDEB performance grants the school symbolic power alone, manifesting in school status and prestige (Gurova, Candido, & Zhou, 2018).

10. For instance, in 2019, a LSA for early-childhood education will be added to SAEB (INEP, 2019b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under grants n. 273871 and 307310.

Notes on contributors

Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido

Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido is a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. She holds a PhD in Political Sociology and a Master’s degree in Regional Development. Her main research interest lie in education politics. She is particularly concerned with large-scale assessments and indicators as source of evidence for policymaking, the interface of public and private actors in education governance, and marketization in education. Her primary geographical focuses of research are Brazil and Finland.