Evaluation and policymaking in education : politics, policy and practice of an Argentine experience

• Main Author: Carlino, Florencia Ruth, 1966-
• Other Authors: Mitchell, Claudia (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 2003
• Subjects: Educational evaluation > Argentina > Buenos Aires; Education and state > Argentina > Buenos Aires
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82840

This thesis analyzes an alternative public evaluation on students' performance which has affected the educational system of the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) since 1992. This evaluation program intends to solve some key dilemmas of the evaluation policy: issues on equity, participation, trustworthiness, comparability and authenticity of the evaluated information. The study focuses on the potential, insight and barriers of this evaluation program. The relevance of this program lies in the fact that it was designed to make a contribution to the democratization of educational administration and to resist some authoritarian effects of a surrounding regional and global context of neoliberal educational reforms. This work also aims at capturing the perspectives about the hegemonic and alternative public policies of centralized evaluation, and collaborative leadership in education held by the contemporary Argentine leaders in education. === This research makes a contribution to the fields of Policy Studies and Leadership in Education and the arena of public evaluation policies, while maintaining a pedagogic perspective of the issues under analysis. The main contribution of the study is that it shows that it is possible to try alternative ways to solve the current political necessity to evaluate large amounts of students in order to inform the educational politics and policies, and at the same time, to attach the evaluation to teachers' and student's pedagogic needs, by involving educators and administrators in central places of the evaluation design and implementation. === The political and theoretical perspective adopted is consistent with a critical socio-pedagogy. Methodologically, this research is a case study oriented by a qualitative methodology, which combines two main techniques: documentary exploration and interviews to 19 leaders of different rank within the analyzed Argentine jurisdiction. The interpretation process, in both the document review and the interviews, is led by a threefold analysis: comprehensive, ethnographic and critical.