SUSEES 2017 Lecture 6 July 6 th 14.00-16.00 Evaluating Education in Europe Emiliano Grimaldi – University of Naples Federico II, Italy Email: emiliano.grimaldi@unina.it This is a draft - Please, do not quote without permission Introduction The lecture addresses the topic of educational evaluation in the European Education Area, starting from the acknowledgement of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 represents the specific object of this lecture. The lecture presents a novel account of this discourse of school evaluation, with its related imperatives of measurement, commensurability, comparison and continuous improvement. In doing so, it employs Michel Foucault’s archaeological method (Foucault, 2002a; 2002b; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Gutting, 1989) and adopts as a privileged space of observation the European field of education. The aim is to show how such a discourse finds its conditions of existence in an episteme where: a) the epistemological space is structured along a trihedron whose vertices are represented by the mathematical and physical sciences, the sciences of life and the philosophical reflection; b) the discourse of school evaluation develops through a set of specific conceptual transferences from economy and biology; c) modern man, intended here as an empirical-transcendental allotrope, is the central figure; d) a modern ethic of action and intervention plays a crucial role in the fabric of morality. Drawing on Foucault (2002a; 2002b; Dean, 2010), the main idea underlying this lecture is that, if one wants to understand the emergence of school evaluation (and its technologies such as international testing and league tables or the diverse neo-managerialist models to evaluate organizational and individual performance, to make just few examples) on the surface of our educational present, it is indispensable to locate the raising of evaluation as a discourse within the modern episteme (Foucault, 2002a) and its space of knowledge, disclosing in particular the rules of formation of evaluative knowledge.