Reading in France is an important issue for education politics. It sustains the Republican imaginary and truth related to the 3Rs which were at the foundation of the French common school. It gives rise to conservative visions and a Republican revivalism, as shown by the recent return of dictation in primary education proclaimed by the Minister himself. It serves also an emancipation project inherited from the Enlightenment that gives great importance to the transmission of basic knowledge to shape citizenship under an influent National Curriculum Council. In education policy, reading is at the core of national assessments, taking the PISA survey as a reference, and a component of the national basic skills framework (Normand, 2022). It corresponds to an epistemic governance (Alasuutari, Qadir, 2014) institutionalized in a National Scientific Council and a Ministerial knowledge center promoting evidence-based knowledge and truth in national conferences, as well as producing reports and designing best-practice guides for primary education teachers. The communication proposes to analyze this production of knowledge and truth on reading that involve different spokespersons and spaces of interest close to the Ministry of Education. These policy assemblages (Gorur,2011) legitimize and shape literacy standards at the crossroad of evidence-based education, experimental economics, neurosciences and metrics. By following this chain of translation, from the ministry to primary schools, it is possible to show how some statements and inscriptions serve an experimental policy that increasingly considers the classroom as a laboratory (Normand, 2016). In doing so, it assumes teaching as a clinic practice, diagnosing student skills and differentiating them according to their psychological pathologies and cognitive disabilities. Then, national assessments as metrics on student learning are used to stabilize classifications and benchmarks by the ministry, to blame and put pressure on the teaching force, and to legitimize an epistemic authority. These national metrics justify other standardized interventions and comparative reasoning from other data borrowed from meta-analyses, systematic review literature and international assessments (Popkewitz, 2022).

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