Becoming data in education: the enactment of the homo oeconomicus through measuring

This article examines how educational measurement instruments in Chile—specifically the School Vulnerability Index (SVI), The complementary questionnaires of the System for Measuring the Quality of Education in Chile (SIMCE), and the complementary questionnaires of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—function as algorithmic and material-discursive apparatuses that co-produce the categories they claim to assess. Drawing on posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories—particularly the works of Karen Barad and Sylvia Wynter—we argue that these measurements are not neutral but are embedded in state rationalities and global governance. Through a diffractive analysis of technical documents and interviews with measurement producers, we show how these instruments normalize subjectivities aligned with the neoliberal figure of homo oeconomicus, reframing inequality as individual risk. Categories like ‘vulnerability’ and ‘ideal student’ are not passively observed but actively constructed through socio-technical assemblages that displace structural critique in favor of predictive logic. By transforming students into datafied subjects and projecting their value as future capital, these instruments entrench social hierarchies while maintaining a discourse of objectivity. We call for rethinking educational measurement practices through epistemic justice, rejecting econometric rationalities in favor of relational, situated understandings of educational injustice.