Introduction

The transition from the 1990s to the 2000s is relevant to understand the changes observed in the International Organizations’ discourse on the priorities for education. The milestones of the period were the world education conferences held in Jomtien in 1990 and in Dakar, in the 2000s. In the first one, the main recommendation to countries was to invest in the universal access to basic education, since illiteracy rates represented major obstacles to the development of capitalism. In Dakar, the International Organizations indicated that the universalization goals were very positive, but learning was still a problem. They claimed, at that time, that learning should be the main objective of education policies for the new millennium, including the UNESCO slogan referring to lifelong learning as a central objective of their future actions. Still in the 1990s, external assessment policies had great relevance in Latin American countries, mainly due to the technical-instrumental rationality of the neoliberalism that was being installed in the region. Countries such as Chile and Colombia took the lead in the process and massively implemented assessments for all grades of primary and secondary education. Other countries, such as Brazil, advanced such policies gradually and continuously, and thus reached the 2000s with robust and complex assessment systems.

The context, associated with the relationship established between learning and teaching quality, has caused external assessments to be a central policy for the countries of the region. The growing need to link education quality to learning measurement led, for example, to the creation of programs such as the Basic Education Development Index, in Brazil, or the Provas Saber, in Colombia. UNESCO created a laboratory which is exclusively dedicated to external assessment in Latin America, called Laboratorio Latinoamericano de Evaluación de la Calidad de la Educación (LLECE). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) created an assessment tool for the central countries, entitled Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The countries of the region made an effort to participate in the assessments on a voluntary basis, in order to have comparative terms with the education of the central countries.

We have therefore experienced the growth in the role of the State as an assessor (^{Afonso, 2009}), with assessment as one of the structuring pillars of the new forms of regulating education in the current stage of capitalism development. The last three decades have witnessed the adoption of quasi-market mechanisms in education, from which the remodeling of the State’s role in the conduct of public policies and the performance of schools and education networks in the teaching and learning processes, aimed at the preparation for external assessments, is materialized. Considering the centrality assumed by assessments to reference the quality of the region’s educational systems, assessment policies were based on the logic of private management, thus emphasizing the results and products of the educational systems. Afonso (2009) calls this new logic as social Darwinism, whose main control and regulation tool is assessment.

International Organizations have heavily invested in the theoretical production on the positive results of assessments. They adopt success stories as modus operandi. They consider the establishment of assessments in countries such as Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Colombia as examples that should be followed by the other Latin American countries. In view of this immense theoretical production disseminated by International Organizations, critical productions on the subject should be urgently elaborated and published. Our objective, in this paper, is to present the political and social context in which external assessments have been developing in the region. We begin with the presentation of what has been called the international agenda for education (^{Akkari, 2011}; 2017; ^{Dale 2004}; ^{Santos et al., 2020}) and the centrality that International Organizations play in the context. We go on to discuss the place of systemic assessment in the agenda and how the papers that make up this dossier are located in the conjuncture described.

The internationalization of education and the centrality of International Organizations

The internationalization of education is initially triggered by the process called by ^{Chesnais (1996}) as the globalization of capital. As the result of the longest and most uninterrupted phase of capital accumulation since the beginning of the twentieth century and processes of liberalization, privatization, deregulation of labor and dismantling of the social rights accumulated by the working class, the movement of globalization of capital impacts all aspects of social life. After all, International Organizations have been playing the role as the true representatives of the capital (^{Santos, 2014}), with a central position in the dissemination of neoliberal economic and political foundations (^{Leher, 1999}; 1998).

Strictly speaking, in the field of education, the discourse resulting from international economic rearrangements has produced tensions between the globalized context and the local dimensions, which are valued in the field of public education policies. In other words, under the discourse of globalization, the adoption of common practices aimed at improving the educational field is defended. As a consequence, an agenda for education is being built, with assumptions and contents that are similar in different national contexts. Practices and discourses considered efficient and effective are globalized; it is announced that the supposed problems in the quality of schools would reside in the way they carry out their activities. It is not, however, a matter of seeking palliative forms that establish comparable standards rather than answers to the problems and how they are originated.

^{Leher (1999}) declares that it is no longer news that International Organizations, given the contradictions generated by the crisis of capitalism and their deliberate actions to meet political, economic, social and cultural demands, are [... devastating the economy of peripheral countries]¹ (Leher, 1999, p. 19). The author explains that the action of several countries’ representatives is witnessed in a very resourceful way, thus impacting fundamental economic decisions.

Still on the relationship between the economic structure and the International Organizations’ actions, Mota Júnior and Maués (2014) assert:

For about two decades, multilateral organizations such as the World Bank (WB), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have guided education policies in peripheral countries, with the aim of responding, within the limits of the educational field and its possibilities of reach, to the structural capitalism crisis in the 1970s, since education came to be seen not only as an important economic frontier to be explored, but also due to its functionality, for major capitalists, in forming a new generation of workers who would be able adapt, in terms of knowledge and techniques, to the new productive and organizational demands of a context marked by the restructuring of productive processes (crisis of Fordism and the advent of the Toyotism) and by a strong crisis in the capitalist State² (Mota Júnior; Maués, 2014, p. 1139).

The excerpt informs the material field in which the actions orchestrated by the International Organizations are produced. We may observe that the ultimate objectives are the development of capitalism, the overcoming of its crises, and the use of education as a form of human capital development (^{Frigotto, 2000}).

^{Akkari (2011}) poses a very provocative questioning about the real existence, within the scenario of internationalization, of purely national policies. The answer seems to indicate the impossibility of thinking of national policies free from some international interference, especially from the recommendations of International Organizations. The fact that there have been international interferences in national policies does not mean, according to the author, that they are the same and operate in the same intensity in every country. The national subsumption to the international decisions has generated, for Akkari, a certain relinquishment from [... the decision-making process related to Education at global (international) and local (subnational, regional) levels, thus reducing the power of the national State]³ (Akkari, 2011, p. 15).

One of the strongest characteristics of internationalization policies is the formation of consensus. As ^{Gramsci (2011}) points out, while analyzing the directivity strategies used by the ruling class to maintain the power, consensus is fundamental, as it does not use force (coercion), but convincing. The subaltern classes are convinced that the societal project proposed by the dominant class is the most appropriate. That is why the activities related to different social areas, such as education, are usually regarded as immutable realities. Through persuasion, Nation-States prepare changes in the educational legislative field that would deprive them of their prerogatives to make decisions and conduct actions both in this and in other fields.

In order to propagate consensus regarding an international standard of what quality education is expected to be, International Organizations use the strategy of disseminating good practices, by comparing countries. In this comparison, as there seem to be both winners and losers (^{Akkari, 2011}), they succeed in establishing a competitive climate that makes losers act to meet the expectations and criteria that lead winners to that position. At the heart of International Organizations’ proposals to reform the Nation-States were the emphasis on basic education, the decentralization of management, the accountability of schools and the centralization of school assessments. Taking assessments as an example, we observe the adoption of systemic assessments impacting on schools. In addition to international assessments, Nation-States prepare their own assessments following the principles of international assessments, which are considered models of efficiency, effectiveness, and success. However, the assessments carried out in national contexts are unfolded into other district/municipal/regional assessments, depending on each country’s political organization.

The comparison among countries, embraced to demonstrate who would adopt education policies that ‘transform’ their practice, has been causing greater permeability to external influences and less capacity to regulate them (^{Akkari, 2011}). As a result, some concepts have become increasingly constant in the international educational scenario: indispensable adaptation to economic globalization; decentralization; privatization of education; obligation of results; accountability; good governance; education quality; curricular reforms; and teacher professionalization.

The papers in this dossier portray, in a very convincing way, the materialization of the international agenda in Latin America. The concepts listed, incorporated into the practice of most Latin American countries, are dealt with in the 14 papers of the dossier, as we will see later on.

Systemic assessments within the internationalization of education

Systemic assessments have occupied a central role in the structured global public agenda for over 30 years. The process, however, is not a linear movement. Throughout that period, changes in its logic may be noted, with the reorganization of different generations of assessment and models (^{Bonamino; Sousa, 2012}).

This intricate movement, added to the international organizations’ guidelines, imbricates nuances favorable to the neoliberal logic and to the accountability mechanisms of educational agents, especially teachers and, consequently, the unaccountability mechanisms related to the public agencies that finance education (^{Real; Conceição, 2024}). This justifies the adherence and pulverization of assessment systems in the various countries and, internally, at the different levels of the federation, which are interconnected with the characteristics of the processes of financial globalization, neoliberal measures, and international organizations’ guidelines.

The movement also exposes complexities that must be understood and analyzed from their new materializations, as such systems continue to be implemented and restructured, with no indication of extinction, at least for the next few years. Examples of the restructuring process are: the formulation of baby PISA (^{Lima, 2023}); the new Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB), which in Brazil includes early childhood education (^{Pimenta; Sousa; Flores, 2021}); and the inclusion of students with special educational needs in the Sistema de Medición de la Calidad de la Educación (SIMCE), with the creation of contradictory inclusive policies in Chile (^{Valdés, Oyarzun; 2023}).

The very concept that involves assessment, in this circumstance, is an issue inserted in the educational arena. After all, educational assessment, besides the prerogatives of the teaching work, has been incorporated in the public agenda, when the intention was to improve the education quality, justified as a form of accountability, that is, the way the State keeps society informed about its actions (^{Afonso, 2009}).

It is remarkable how systemic assessment is assimilated by society by means of processes that may simplify the conceptualization of quality by means of concrete numerical indications, formalized in scores understandable to the general public (^{Oliveira; Sousa; Alavarse, 2011}), and the intensification and sophistication of the systemic assessment results dissemination processes (^{Carvalho, 2016}). Among such processes is the use of the media, which facilitates the access to information, in advertisements and journalistic articles (^{Dias; Mascia, 2022}), by choosing a language that is intended for anyone, not just for technicians and/or researchers.

In view of the conceptual issue, the terms used to define the assessment dimension, coordinated by government agencies and monitored by the State, with the application of tests/examinations as a characteristic, are: large-scale assessment (^{Sousa, 2014}); standardized or parameterized assessment (^{Casassus, 2009}); external assessment (^{Machado; Alavarse, 2014}; ^{Cáceres, 2012}); assessment by performance (^{Almeida, 2015}); and systemic assessment (^{Coelho, 2008}), among others. In this text, we have chosen ‘systemic assessment’, due to the lack of uniformity in the area, but, above all, to better represent its declared objectives, in order to identify the quality of the set of schools and institution networks, organized in the form of educational systems.

The literature (^{Bauer; Alavarse; Oliveira, 2015}; ^{Valdés; Oyarzun, 2023}) on the theme arouses considerations that explain the collateral effects of the ongoing assessment in the educational system, such as curriculum standardization; school classification and ranking; the expansion of the promotion of intra-school inequalities; the precarious definition of quality as students’ performance; and teachers’ accountability for poor results, among other effects. However, its potential to imprint quality is not disregarded (Oliveira; Sousa; Alavarse, 2011).

Therefore, the great issue that permeates the considerations on the assessment system is to conceive assessment processes based on the systems in place which, in fact, expand the understanding of quality, beyond the reductionist logic of obtaining good results in standardized tests. It is assumed that the assessment is not neutral. The challenge is detailed by ^{Sousa (2014}, p. 415):

Seeking assessment proposals that contribute to the realization of a quality notion that is not restricted to the results of tests applied in large-scale assessments is a challenge that is posed to those who seek the democratization of education, a commitment that demands a greater scope in the analysis of the educational reality, by including, in a related way, initiatives from the various governmental bodies, as well as shared relationships.⁴

We admit that assessments may potentially contribute to quality improvement, when we think about the years of Latin American experience with the adoption of assessment practices that involve international systems and, notably, the systems developed by the Nation-States in the region.

These experiences, portrayed in the literature in the area here mentioned, inform study objects and themes that require a scientific look, when it comes to improving the current assessment policy, based on the assumption that the education quality lies in enabling learning for all. Such objects and themes are related to the following aspects: the curriculum; the influences of international organizations, especially the World Bank, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the OECD; the current assessment practices in the region; the concepts that involve the trinomial assessment-quality-learning; assessment as a mechanism for school and educational management. In summary, it is a matter of rethinking the assessment systems aimed at achieving an education with which everyone learns, which, implicitly, contributes to a more democratic and emancipatory aspect of the educational systems.

The present proposal, by involving the groups of texts that make up this dossier, seeks to shed light on the relationship assessment-quality-learning, with the intention to broaden the debate and the considerations, especially by revealing the changes in the international organizations’ discourse over time, as well as discussing the possibilities indicated by the assessment practices in Latin American countries.

In summary, the assessment of the education quality is discussed in this paper, particularly when it highlights its processes and the uses regarding systemic assessments. Thus, the arguments included here seek more than answers. They seek to present contributions to the area, in order to rethink the ongoing process.

What the papers say: visions, conceptions, and recommendations for assessments in different contexts

This paper is an introduction to a topic of great relevance to the region’s educational systems. It aims at unveiling the scenario where assessment policies are developed in different contexts in Latin America. We emphasize that the process of internationalization of education has been paved under the discourse of the adoption of educational standards of excellence. We also underline that the papers in this dossier are, at the same time, an invitation to deepen the implications of the discourse on the school contexts in the region and a way of denouncing the damage that such incorporation has brought to the adoption of a critical assessment that may break with the market and performance logic of the assessment systems, currently seen in most Latin American countries.

We thus organized the texts into four groups: the first group includes those papers that discuss systemic assessment, by problematizing concepts and practices from a critical perspective, regarding the directions that the practice has taken in Latin America. The texts in second group address the exam PISA, applied by the OECD, and emphasize its weaknesses and its implications for the school management and the teaching work. Group three, on the other hand, analyzes, in a more specific way, the recommendations of the World Bank and UNESCO for the education in Latin American countries. The fourth group brings more localized discussions (municipal or national) on curricular reduction and the place of systemic assessments in teachers’ initial formation. This last group is about more specific cases in Latin American countries.

Some considerations

After over 30 years since the first systemic assessments began to occupy a central place in school systems, we have observed adherence to a managerial vision for the school. Assessment assumes such centrality in the managerial logic that its meaning is inverted; it ceases to be a planning tool to become an inducer of actions and practices. The International Organizations are mainly responsible for part of such change. As we have disclosed in this dossier, they drastically influence the functioning of education in Latin American countries.

By exposing the papers in such a way for the reader to follow the trajectory of assessment policies, from the general to the most particular aspects, the dossier demonstrates the capillarity of International Organizations, whose strategies defend the adoption of educational standards of excellence, by means systemic assessment. This discourse is critically denounced by the literature in the area, in the search for proposals that break with the performative logic currently prevailing in most Latin American countries.