External evaluation of schools in Portugal and the global agenda

Abstract

New modes of global educational governance are affecting contemporary education (Gulson, Lewis, Lingard, Lubienski, Takayama, & Webb, 2017). Educational evaluation is one example of how the global agenda discourses are significant to national contexts, making the global commitments the basis of the glocal actors’ agency (Ball, 2016). Grounded by this framework we aim to analyse how transnational discourses can be significant to the glocal actors (Ball, 2016), creating yardsticks to cater to its global agenda, namely in the case of the school evaluations in Portugal. External Evaluation of Schools (EES) system in Portugal reflects the globalised education policy, expressing the significance of mobile transnational discourses. The Portuguese system endorses schools’ evaluation as a formative instrument aiming for the quality of the schools. The results of this evaluation have been published by national and transnational reports from different organizations. In Portugal, the Inspectorate-General of Education and Science (IGEC) published four reports (IGEC, 2013; 2015; 2016; 2018) concerning the EES second cycle (2011-2017). At the transnational level, the OECD has produced reports about evaluation (OECD, 2013; Santiago, Donaldson, Looney, & Nusche, 2012), the Eurydice did an overview of schools’ evaluations in Europe (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2015) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2017) also approached quality education issues globally. Transnational organizations contribute to a global neoliberal policy that emphasises the same imaginaries and reform movements around the world (Sahlberg, Hasak, & Rodriguez, 2017). Consequently, the effects of the education policy of borrowing and lending (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012) create a refraction process (Goodson & Rudd, 2012) of the global discourses to the national context. Likewise, the Portuguese EES system reflects the globalised education policy, expressing how significant mobile transnational discourses are. This ubiquity of transnational educational perspectives reinforces the importance of the debate, regarding the conditions and consequences of the soft regulation (Jacobsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006) in the refraction processes (Goodson & Rudd, 2012).