International standardised examinations are one of the privileged ways in which global education policies seek to provide quality education for all. However, testing technologies have embedded principles of exclusion in both the criteria they use and the student profiles they admit. The goal of this presentation will be to explore through a discourse analysis how the inclusion/exclusion reform movement occurs in Latin America. Although international testing and measuring both have a long history of use in Western countries, the scope of the technological and epistemological infrastructure now available is helping to shape a global education network not previously imagined. In Latin America, UNESCO’s Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory study (TERCE) is the latest regional assessment to look at student achievement; it was implemented in 2013 in 15 countries. This presentation will aim to track the ways in which the rationality embracing inclusion and testing was cultivated in Latin America. Hence, we will explore TERCE’s key findings, in-depth reports, policy orientations, assessment frameworks for the different areas, research papers, and publications. In addition, we will study UNESCO’s Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE) that coordinates the quality assessment network. LLECE produces information and knowledge that enriches education policymaking in the region. In a world where international agencies and actors are spreading at a fast pace, unpacking the ways in which these international networks both imagine the future global citizen and ‘act through’ education, the process of shaping the present becomes critical. Through a genealogical discourse analysis, the presentation will analyse how cultural, historical, political, and religious narratives make possible the common sense ‘truth’ of paired inclusion and testing in the educational scenario. In analysing the Latin American testing milieu, the study will promote a debate about the new modes of the governance of international organisations. Shedding light on the ways these ‘global truths’ are constructed by international agencies will allow for exploring both the limits and possibilities of establishing the future in the present.

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