Um ritual ressignificado: a escola entre provas

This article provides an anthropological analysis of large-scale assessments in school environments, based on the assumption that tests are ritualised events within school environments. This type of work is important for deepening discussions about the state and public policies from the point of view of the public assisted and/or the professionals who carry them out. It is part of an ethnography presented as a doctoral thesis, in which systematic participant observation was carried out in a public high school in the interior of Ceará between the years 2019 and 2022, in which the main focus of observation was the preparation, application and development of external evaluations at the research site. The fieldwork and the intersubjectivity it provokes prompted a literature review of concepts about rituals, as well as the genesis and structures of large-scale assessments inside and outside of Brazil, something that leads to a comparison of logics in the fields of managerial public administration and school education. Some of the results include the perception of tests as ritual moments typical of school culture, which, for political and economic reasons, have been used to evaluate public policies. This implies an exogenous test, more positioned and identified with the coercive and symbolic power of the state, overlapping with and somewhat delegitimising endogenous tests, interfering in social roles and reinforcing some deep-rooted customs such as training students for tests.