This paper reflects on the distinctive contribution that sociology of education can offer to the scientific and policy debate on school evaluation and the analysis of the enactment of its policies and models in the European education space. In a European and global scenario where sociologists are fascinated by or struggle against the hegemonic evidence-based perspective in the field of evaluation (and its rationalist and functionalist underpinnings), this work attempts to value the potential that sociology has to inhabit and connect different dialogic spaces (professional, policy, critique and public - see Burawoy, 2005), thanks to its disposition towards epistemic reflexivity (Bourdieu e Wacquant, 1992) and the analysis of the processes of objectivation. 

To offer an example of this potential, the paper carries on an exercise of epistemic reflexivity on the case of the Italian National School Evaluation System and, specifically, on one of its key technologies: the School Annual Self-Evaluation Report. Such an analysis is structured in two main sections. First, the self-evaluation report is problematized looking at the distinctive objectivation of the educational process that it produces, the innovation model that it assumes and the kind of professional reflexivity that it implies. On this basis, the second section reflects on the possibility to mobilise sociological knowledge on the situated, reflexive and socio-material character of social action to design evaluative tools and processes that did not produce conflations between conflicting accountability logics and valued teachers’ professional phronesis (Hammersley, 2016) and the political dimension of their practice (Biesta, 2007).

First, the paper argues that the Italian School Annual Self-Evaluation Report and other widespread similar technologies of school evaluation objectivise the educational process through the transference of the figure of production from political economy and the field of scientific management. In doing so, they construct the historicity of educational and school work as a history of forms of production, products and changes in the organisation of the means of production, that become the key determinants of effectiveness and value. Second, the paper ends with an attempt to mobilise key sensitizing concepts from sociological theory to propose an alternative objectivation of the educational process and school work as evaluandum, adopting a relational perspective on the interplay between the material and symbolic structural forms and school and professional agency. The proposed evaluative model intends to refocus evaluation on the ethical and political dimension of educational practice (Biesta, 2007), avoiding the risk, sin the case of the Italian School Annual Self-Evaluation Report, to neutralise the political in a field which is constitutively political, where the key questions that a reflexive professional is expected to address cannot be reduced to the effectiveness of the employed educational tools and techniques, but rather have to be moved by the acknowledgement that what effectiveness means depends on judgements on what is educationally desirable.

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