In Brazil, the large scale educational assessment is part of school life, being used to rank schools or for the purpose of drawing an overview of the quality of education offered to children, possibilities that depend on the political context in which they are inserted and will provide direction for educational policies. The aim of this paper is to discuss the National Literacy Assessment (ANA) as a policy of assessment for elementary school, seeking to understand how this Policy guides the work developed in the classroom by the literacy teacher. For this, we considered authors that deal with the policies of large scale assessments and the results of these, in addition to guiding documents, ordinances, guides, plans, reports and normative related to ANA. Because it is not a procedural or diagnostic evaluation, ANA does not enable the immediate follow-up of students as occurs with Provinha Brasil, with a faster intervention and individualized results. However, its results point to an important diagnosis for the comprehension of the data, which are the social context indicators produced from the analysis of external factors, but which exert great influence on the literacy process of the students. The relationship established between the processes and the results achieved at the national, state and municipal levels, evidences the need for investigation of the relations that are produced between the instituted policies and the constitution of relative processes for the learning of all children in the literacy cycle.
