TRANSFORMING SCHOOL EVALUATION: A CRITICAL THEORY OF INCLUSION AND EDUCATIONAL PARTICIPATION, AND A MORE EMANCIPATORY ONE.

Abstract

Discussing School Evaluation in order to respond to the urgent demands of the Colombian educational system—particularly those established by Decree 1290 of 2009—requires deep critical reflection. It becomes inevitable to question whether such a standardized practice as evaluation and the traditional notion of “magistrality” in pedagogical practice can truly generate meaningful responses and results for a population characterized by diverse learning processes. Therefore, this paper aims to pause and reflect on whether evaluation is truly applied coherently, or whether its meaning and purpose have been distorted.Beyond this vision, we seem to be forcing students to follow demanding standards that do not even meet the criteria of standardization itself. It appears that evaluation has become subordinated to power structures, stagnation, and the reproduction of inequalities. For this reason, this document proposes to transform school evaluation through a new critical theory that promotes democratic participation, contextual relevance, emancipation, and inclusion. This work calls for the abolition of punitive assessment and demands a transformative, friendly, dialogical, and humanizing paradigm—one free from fear and coercion, shifting from the traditional to the transformational.Equally important is the insistence that evaluation today has become an object of measurement that fragments knowledge and weakens the learner, turning them into a permanent object of assessment. Therefore, this proposal seeks to transform these weaknesses into a form of emancipation that transcends the current paradigm, based on the theory of complexity (Morin, 2004) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 2005), coherently oriented toward an evaluation grounded in justice, inclusion, and social transformation.