The New Public Manegment (NPM) influences educational policy in many aspects. One of them deals with strengthen global governance by the reinforce the involvment of stakehoders from the business sector and philanthropy in educational policy. This involvement strives to adapt values of globalism, standards, and accountability as part of the educational evaluation policy (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013).

The educational evaluation policy targets power relations between different stakeholders. The stakeholder's position and values are more often reveal in the way they identify structural problems and strategical difficulties in the education system. That effects both the educational evaluation policy and the expectancy from the education system to enact and implement the policy. The enactment of evaluation policy is more often challenging due to demands from the formal authorities and obstacles from inside the educational system (Adert-German, 2021; Ball, Magurie, Braun, & Hoskins, 2011; Camphuijsen, 2020).

The objective of this research is to comprehend the scope of evaluation policy and the effects of NPM on it. This highlights the influence of different ideologies and standards regarding educational evaluation policy. Moreover, the research challenges policy stakeholder's expectancy from enactment and implementation of the policy.  

Our research deals with the educational policy in Israel since 2005. This was a significant year for Israeli education policy because of the Dovrat (Israel National Force for Education) Committee, which revealed their findings and recommendations.

This committee raised concerns regarding improving evaluation and measurement of the educational system, and adopting an evaluation policy that promotes accountability (Livni-Huberman, 2021; Resnik, 2011).

The Dovrat committee recommended establishing the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation. It was also involved in the evaluation policy and its implementation in the educational system, including the national and international examinations. Another notable recommendation was creating the position of evaluation coordinator. A coordinator is a teacher specializing in the field of evaluation. This teacher trained to become the school evaluation coordinator and to enact the evaluation policy within the school.

This research conducted using qualitative methods including extensive analysis of formal policy documents, such as legislation and governmental registers. We also included informal policy documents in our analysis. These documents included protocols and unofficial professional reports, due to the importance of unofficial documents for comprehensive understanding of different stakeholders’ perspectives. The research included also interviews with politicians and other high-level decision makers in the Israeli education system. The qualitative thematic analysis was based on Carol Bacchi’s critical methodology, which relies on Foucault's critical approach (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016; Bacchi, 2020). Becchi's methodology identifies the problems and solutions implemented by the policy. The methodology — What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) — highlights problems, and how they have been presents in the public domain. This encapsulates the influence of bureaucracy and the relationship amongst external stakeholders. Furthermore, Bacchi recommended considering stakeholders who were excluded from legislation.

The educational evaluation policy highlighted difficulties in the functioning of the Israeli educational system. Policy makers outlines the system inability to track achievements due to the lack of academic standardizations and characterize a problematic system that does not achieve global academic goals. They identified lack of the standardizations as a problem, and expressed the need for a centralized evaluation policy. Conversely, there are those who promotes strict policy as a potential solution for the challenges of the educational system. They believe that systematic and public evaluation leads to competition, which strengthens the accountability of the system and can lead for pragmatic solution for the system challenges. For example, substandard results in national exams will lead principals to enact differently in order improve achievements. The different approaches reflect the dispute about evaluation policy, due to the involvement of internal and external stakeholders. Within the educational system, there are different approaches regarding the role of evaluation. Moreover, power relationships influences the current dialogue regarding internal and external evaluation. External stakeholders challenge the educational system to conform to measurable objectives and adopt NPM values. While the volatile situation in the government and the deficiency of the educational system creates instability in evaluation policy. Some stakeholders request to use evaluation as a tool to strengthen the educational system. For example, the use of internal evaluation methods to improve learning and ongoing analysis for improving management and infrastructures. Yet, those stakeholders express distrust in the ability of schools to use evaluation for addressing challenges. Under the volatile situation and different attitudes, unfortunately, the policy resulted in substandard outcomes. Stakeholders noted that attempt to define current evaluation policy, implemented with conflicting results. Our research represents a variety of attitudes amongst stakeholders involved with evaluation policy. These values influence policy enactment and reinforced within the school system.

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