High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, Sweden is no exception. Stephen Ball (2006:143) views educational reforms like the focus upon standardization as a “policy epidemic” that is spreading across the globe. As inter-related educational reforms spread, they permeate and reorient educational systems in different social and political contexts . Ball further argues that the discourse of reform is promoted by powerful agents like the World Bank and the OECD, and is articulated in different ways to apply to different political orientations. Ball concludes that the new package of educational reforms are held against older policy technologies of professionalism and bureaucracy and thereby help to re-align the public sector towards the methods and ethics of private markets and forms of “privatisation.” One key element implemented by the policy of standardization is performativity. The culture of performativity encompasses many assessment mechanisms including annual reviews, appraisals, peer reviews, and other measurable criteria (Ball 2008: 50). Given the demands of the test teachers are forced to pay less attention to the actual academic and pedagogical needs of their students and more attention to “impression management” (Ball 2006:12). Andy Hargreaves (2003) discusses this tendency toward more standardization as a de-professionalization of teacher’s work. Standardised tests do not only measure the students’ performance, they also evaluate the teachers’ work and rob teachers of their flexibility and creativity. Our aim is to analyze the effects of the standardized test- in classroom practices in a compulsory school with children aged 10-12, in an inner-city area in Sweden. In our analysis we apply the concept of the pedagogic device (Bernstein 2000). The concept the pedagogic device provides a framework for understanding how high-stakes, standardized testing reproduces inequality in schools through the regulation and distribution of different forms of knowledge, and the selective regulation and distribution of different forms of identity. Doing this , we look upon how identities are articulated in the pedagogic device (teachers’ and school leaders’ speech and in relevant policy texts). By articulation we mean a process of linking together and making a unity of separate parts which are by no means given (Fairclough, 1995; Hall, 2003). This implies that we scrutinize how different affordances of identity are linked to a formation of chains of significance, actions, and representations.

The data are collected from an ethnographic inquiry situated in a compulsory school with children aged 10-12, in an inner-city area in Sweden. Alongside with interviews; observations, conversations with educators are data analyzed in the study. Observations and interviews were usually documented through field-notes and tape-recorded. Additional data sources consist of schedules, policy documents, artefacts, etc (Burgess, 1984; Hammersley & Atkinson 1995; Thomas, 1993).

The resultant displays how the demands from the test impact the daily work in classrooms. In the neo-liberal approach to governance, standardized tests have become an important measurement of quality and outcomes. School practices run the risk of being viewed as a matter of the performance of teachers and students at the individual level. This view moves the focus from a discussion about a societal responsibility to ensure that all children have equitable access to education to a debate about an individual’s responsibility to perform. At this individual level, there are “good” and “bad” teachers, and “good” and “bad” students. Our argument is that the success of school are not a function of good or bad teachers and students, but a function of adequate or inadequate demands placed upon a school from outside forces.