The paper addresses the topic of educational evaluation in the European Education Area, starting from the acknowledgement of the widespread of policies, measures, procedures and tools for school evaluation that has interested compulsory schooling in almost all the countries that belong to the European Area (Eurydice, 2015). What I argue for is the existence of a discourse on school evaluation which is global and particularly effective in the European Area. Such a discourse finds its distinctive traits in the recurrence of a set of discursive regularities. The analysis of these discursive regularities and their conditions of existence represents the specific object of this contribuion.

The paper is structured in two sections.

First, drawing on policy and official document (Eurydice, 2015; European Council, 2009; European Commission, 2012; OECD, 2013) I will show how the widespread of school evaluation is related to distinctive bodies of knowledge, forms of expertise and authority and a related ethico-political frame. Moreover, the paper will illustrate how such a grid of discursive regularities emerges within (and contributes to the constitution of) a multi-scalar transnational policyscape where a distinctive set of powerful and heterogeneous assemblages of agencies, bodies of knowledge and technologies perform the power to shape educational change in Europe. The bodies of knowledge constituting this space are the field of investigation of this paper, whereas the conditions of existence of these bodies of knowledge are the specific object of analysis. 

Second, the paper explores in depth the discursive regularities that constitute a transnational discourse of school evaluation that shows a distinctive effectiveness in the European education area: 

a) School Evaluation as part of a wider strategy of Quality Assurance in the field of education

b) the recursive emergence of an approach to school evaluation that is named as holistic approach

c) the recurrence of external and internal evaluation as an ordering dualism

d) the recursive emergence of evaluation models designed on the model of production

e) school effectiveness and improvement as the main theories that articulate the nexus between the scientific and the policy domain.

At this stage, the paper will address what Foucault has named the archaeological level of analysis and will focus on the conditions of existence for the social regularities that constitute the discourse of school evaluation. This means to understand what is the epistemic configuration of the space of knowledge where the heterogeneous statements on school evaluation confront each others and, eventually, struggle. 

The analysis carried on in the paper employs Michel Foucault’s archaeological method (Foucault, 2002a; 2002b; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Gutting, 1989). In doing so it assumes as a privileged focus of analysis the formation of concepts. The analytical strategy employed in the paper has the objective to describe the organization of the field of statements in which evaluative concepts emerge and circulate (Foucault, 2002b, p. 62). This organisation is articulated through: a) forms of succession, that is different modalities of dispersion of series of statements (schemes of dependence, ordering and/or succession); b) forms of coexistence, that define the nature of the relations between recursive and widely used concepts in discourse; c) procedures of intervention, that are allowed to be legitimately applied on statements, among which it is worth to recall here those of translation, systematization, redefinition and rewriting. The analysis of concepts’ formation aims to determine according to what patterns the statements are linked to each others within a wider discourse that establishes between the concepts themselves forms of deduction, derivation, coherence, incompatibility, substitution, exclusion or reciprocal transformation (ivi, p. 68). The analytical strategy employed here is the following: a) to describe a conceptual network on the basis of the intrinsic regularities of the discursive practice; b) to reconstruct the grid of conceptual compatibilities and incompatibilities; c) to relate the emerging conceptual network to the distinctive rules of formation of a discursive practice.

The paper highlights how in the European Education Area it is possible to recognize the effectiveness of a discourse of school evaluation that: • has the project to establish itself, at different levels, a mathematical formalization; • proceeds through models and/or concepts translated from economy and biology; • explores some distinctive empirical manifestations of ‘that mode of being of man which philosophy is attempting to conceive at the level of radical finitude’ (Foucault, 2002a, p. 379). The paper will focus on the relevance of the conceptual transferences from economy in the constitution of the discourse of school evaluation. I will attempt to show how educational words, beings and objects of need take their places and arrange themselves in relation to one another in a space of knowledge that is heavily informed by the rise of production as a fundamental figure (ivi, p. 275), which in turn makes visible new objects and subjects that become knowable employing the concepts and methods of economy. The value of the analysis lies in two distinct traits. First, it goes beyond a mere critique of the contemporary obsession for evaluation, showing how and to what extent it is rooted in the deeper categories of Western thought and the processes of rationalization that are a key driver of modernity. It allows to focus on the domains within which truth and falsehood of any evaluative statement about education and its qualities is discussed, certain educational statements are excluded or marginalised as well as educational problems and their solutions are thought (and hierarchized) and enacted. Second, it represent a crucial step, although an initial and non sufficient one, to grasp the processes through which the objects, the subjects and the concepts of the education space are shaped and the social construction of actors’ answers to evaluation policies.

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