Kan vi räkna med läraren

Are teachers to be counted on? This article focuses on the consequences of evaluating teachers and teachers’ practice. The discussion relates to a specific report which argues in favour of a need for evaluation by present-ing a supposed correlation between teacher intelligence and effectiveness in education and in which suppositions and propositions are made not only about teachers and teachers’ practice, but about education and effectiveness as well. This, however, is done without any reference to theoretical demarca-tions on the subject. Theory is by large effectively avoided, and in the ruins of the teacher as a subject remains what I refer to as a ”cognitive economy”. This transition of the teacher as a subject into an object is understood by Lyotard’s description of language games and the discourse of perfomativ-ity in science. A further point of departure is Rose’s and Hacking’s analysis on how politics, ideology and moral values are constructed by the use of statistics and measurements as a language of power.