The Uses of Evidence for Educational Policymaking: Global Contexts and International Trends

Education Context and English Teaching and Learning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: An Overview

“…This means that there are no co-educational institutions, marking Saudi Arabia as one of the few countries that aligns to a single-sex school system. The segregation of the students may be attributed to the beliefs of Islam, although single-sex schooling is also associated with cultural, social and traditional values (Wiseman, 2010). Single-sex education can be found in other Middle Eastern countries such as Jordan and Bahrain, where there is no co-education in intermediate and secondary schools (Fryer & Levitt, 2010).…”

“…The Directorate of Education was responsible for opening new schools and offices across the country. The first public schools were established in 1930, but only male students were formally enrolled (Alsharif, 2011;Wiseman, 2010). In 1960, female students were formally enrolled into education but were segregated from boys in separate schools (Al-Zarah, 2008).…”

Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education

“…The idea that professional practices such as education should be based upon or at least be informed by evidence has become influential in many countries around the world (for a recent overview see Wiseman 2010). A quick scan of journal titles not only indicates the growing popularity of the idea of evidence-based practice but also highlights its presence in a large number of professional domains, ranging from medicine-where the idea of evidence-based practice was initially developed in the early 1990s (see Guyatt et aleducation (see Biesta 2007a).…”

PISA for Schools: Topological Rationality and New Spaces of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance

“…10 Given the broad recognition and awareness of the OECD, and the PISA "brand," within national education discourses and policy making, the ability of PISA for Schools to produce legitimate and internationally recognized "proof" of a school's performance may well make such evidence a valued commodity for local communities (see Rutkowski 2015), especially for schools that are doing well. Indeed, and in the context of evidence-based (or perhaps "evidenceinformed") education policy making (Head 2008;Wiseman 2010;Lingard 2013), the evidence most valued by participating schools and districts is that which relates to measurable changes in, and positive representations of, local performance. In this way, according to the logic of the OECD, school performance can no longer be sufficiently assessed within the nation but must now also be compared globally in order to assess success, further construing-and bestowing meaning to-education through the lens of a "global eye" (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003).…”

“…Building on Woodward's (2009) conception of the OECD's normative and cognitive modes of governance, we would further emphasize the largely "soft" epistemological nature of the organization's global influence in education (Carroll and Kellow 2011;Sellar and Lingard 2014). This enables the OECD to exert considerable influence over which policy discoursesnamely those that are evidence based (Head 2008;Wiseman 2010), reformist/ameliorative (Kaloyannaki and Kazamias 2009), and scientistic/positivist (Lingard et al 2015)-and which representations of student, school, and system performance (namely, PISA referenced) are most valued, thus determining (and restricting) what can count as "sensible policy" (Ball and Junemann 2012, 11) for local educators and policy makers.…”