School systems develop in pursuit of three social goals: democratic equality; social efficiency; social mobility (Labaree 2008). Over the last three decades, these ideals coexisted with a tension arising from the institutionalization of performance-based accountability regimes, with different modalities and intensities (Verger & Normand 2015). In Portugal, the appearance of school rankings in 2001 symbolically marks the emergence and consolidation of forms of coordination, ordering and control of educational systems and their actors, characterized by taking results as a central value of a policy that is carried out based on results (Carvalho, Costa & Sant'Ovaia 2020). Since then, this and other evaluation and assessment instruments, such as national examinations or ILSAs, have been shaping public debate on education and raising controversies between the different «principles of justice» (Dubet 2004) that have been affected by school public. This paper focuses on the opinion published in the Portuguese reference press/media on education, aiming to analyse the philosophical principles that have been wielded - and combined - in the public sphere to equate the way in which the State has managed or should seek to ensure the common good and implement a fair school. Therefore, we analyse the editorials and opinion texts published by the newspaper «Público» in three different periods: 2001 (year in which the school rankings appear in Portugal); 2011 (when we discern the intensification of performance-based accountability, with an emphasis towards a quasi-market orientation and a greater relevance given to external rewards/sanctions as a driver of change); and 2021 (twenty years after the first publication of school rankings, and in a socio-political context in which policy texts rhetoric combine the topics of accountability and inclusion, closely following the OECD’s ideational matrix for education). Based on the content analysis of circa three dozen editorials and six dozen opinion texts, the paper discusses the diversity of principles of justice in circulation and in use over these two decades. This paper shows that the three social goals assigned to the systems schools remain – and perpetuate themselves - based on different combinations, and thus configuring different judgments about State intervention in education.

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