Institutional devices and school failure management: the paradoxes of attention to diversity in ESO

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an ethnographic study of one of the main institutional devices meant to tackle “school failure” within secondary compulsory education (ESO) in Spain: the so called “attention to diversity measures” (MAD). Analysing the practical logic of these programs in a specific context, it shows how students are constructed for each program through classification practices and routines, how teachers’ expectations and practices are affected by these institutional classifications, and how MAD experience multiple tensions and ambivalences in their pedagogical organization. These institutional devices have modified the structure of compulsory education and the processes of educational selection, affecting the construction of scholastic judgments, student hierarchies and trajectories.