Large-scale evaluation, with standardized tests, proposes to align, in theory, with the political pedagogical project of schools and with teacher training as the main guiding objective of school reform. This alignment sparked significant changes in the educational field from the 1990s onwards in many countries, including Brazil, through educational reforms marked by the need to develop a global educational project to meet the productive restructuring of the capitalist system. From a neoliberal educational policy perspective, they have been provoking structural tensions in teacher training, in teaching work, in the school’s curricular organization, in the way of evaluating and in the life of students, when it points to the external evaluation policy as the cornerstone for improvement of the quality of education in the perspective of a classificatory rationality of an evaluationist character. This evaluation model has strengthened the link between productivity, human capital and educational policy. This logic makes education allied to market-focused economic growth, having as its diffusers the international economic organizations that have played a crucial role in spreading the hegemonic discourse about a quantifiable and measurable education, based on the teaching of competences, which it puts into circulation a policy that interferes in the way education systems are conducted around the world, based on its pragmatic character, providing data and indicators that allow comparisons and classifications. The objective of this study is to investigate and reflect to what extent teacher training, within the scope of current educational reforms, strongly centered on external evaluation policy, may or may not induce teachers to improve evaluation results such as those measured by the Permanent System. Evaluation of Basic Education of Ceará (SPAECE), a system of the State’s own external evaluation of learning outside the school. In this way, we analyzed and described, based on the readings of the discourses of mathematics teachers from the Fortaleza school system in the final years of elementary school and who exercised the role of teacher trainer, school directors, pedagogical coordinators and classroom teachers. , their understanding of the impacts of educational reforms and external evaluation on their pedagogical practice. In the applied methodology, the technique of individualized semi-structured interviews was used, of discourse analysis of a hermeneutic, immanent and predominantly qualitative nature of the participants’ speech. All this work is anchored in the theoretical and practical bases of the research developed by a collection of many authors who dialogue with the theme of this investigation such as Ball (2011), Fernandes (2019), Freitas (2007), Lopes (2016), Marx (2001) ), Pêcheux (1997), Ravitch (2011), Popkewitz (1992), Luckesi (2011), Libâneo (2018) among others. In the face of many testimonies from teachers about the research object, it became clear how much the effect of the SPAECE implementation policy can result in an “evaluationist” educational policy, an externality that is imposed on the school environment and that makes teachers and students do not feel committed to improving education, although this educational policy assumes an increasing centrality in the school routine.
Keywords: educational public policy; neoliberalism; SPAECE-CE large-scale evaluation;
teacher training.