De nouvelles connaissances pour une nouvelle gouvernance par les résultats ? L’exemple de l’éducation en France et de trois outils d’évaluation

Within the perspective of the sociology of educational policies, this article analyses the conception, implementation and reception of three major tools for evaluating public educational activity in France : standardized evaluations of student attainments, performance indicators for secondary schools and an annual publication on the state of the educational system. Based on qualitative research methods (mainly interviews, analyses of corpuses of documents and consultation of statisticians’ personal records), it shows that over the course their careers, these tools have led to several forms of administrative backsliding on the part of the national education ministry’s central administration, resulting in a backsliding as regards the new knowledge at their origin, a backsliding which has appreciably altered the policy goals those tools embody, as well as their regulative capacity. Entering the subject through the types of knowledge effectively produced by these tools thus furnishes particularly fertile ground for questioning the modalities of the current changes in regulation going on in the French educational system and for understanding the specific forms assumed by the evaluation policy in this country and this sector of public action