After school: metrics, governance and the capture of the school future

Abstract

This article problematizes how contemporary educational assessment policies participate in the material constitution of Brazilian public schools. In dialogue with Karen Barad’s Agential Realism and with posthumanist and new materialist discussions, the text seeks to understand how indexes, digital platforms, standardized mock exams, and projected IDEB targets cease to operate merely as technical monitoring instruments and begin to reorganize curricula, pedagogical temporalities, school planning, and forms of learning intelligibility. Methodologically, the research is developed through diffractive readings inspired by Karen Barad, placing official documents, bonus policies, monitoring platforms, and discussions on performativity, materiality, and temporality in intra-action. Rather than interpreting educational metrics as neutral representations of a preexisting reality, the study follows how these apparatuses materially participate in the production of the contemporary school. The article argues that indexes do not operate only retrospectively upon already produced learning outcomes, but infiltrate statistical futurities into the present of the school even before pedagogical experience takes place. It concludes that contemporary assessment policies produce continuous regimes of anticipation, insufficiency, and auditability, reorganizing the very conditions of existence of school learning.