The phrase shows up in a predictable spot. A district is deciding whether to adopt a reading program, a behavior framework, or a platform, and somewhere in the second half of the meeting someone says that the option on the table is research-based. What happens next is the part that interests me. The conversation doesn’t get more rigorous so much as shorter, and the questions that were still open a moment earlier, about whether this is the kind of thing the district wants to be doing at all, get treated as settled by a claim that never addressed them.
I’m describing this as a composite rather than a single meeting because it has happened often enough that no one version is the real one. I’ve been the person saying it. I’ve written it into proposals and put it on slides, and when I ask for source grounding before I draft an article, which I do as a matter of routine, I’m reaching for the same authority. So this isn’t a piece about other people’s bad habit. It’s a piece about a phrase I keep using and have started to distrust, and about what I think it’s doing when it works.
What does the phrase actually answer?
“Research-based” is a claim about means. It says that some intervention, delivered under some conditions, produced some measured effect on some outcome. That’s useful information. It’s also information of a narrow kind, and the narrowness is easy to miss because the phrase carries the tone of a full verdict. Effectiveness is never freestanding, in that something is effective at producing a particular result, and the result had to be chosen before anyone could measure progress toward it. A reading program that raises scores on a fluency assessment is effective if fluency, as that assessment defines it, is what you were after. Whether that’s what you were after isn’t a research question but a question about what you want reading instruction to be for, and the study can’t answer it because the study assumed an answer in order to get started.
Gert Biesta made this argument in a 2007 essay whose title I haven’t been able to get out of my head: “Why ‘What Works’ Won’t Work.” His point is that evidence-based practice, imported into education largely from medicine, treats the ends of education as given and leaves open only the question of which means reach them most efficiently. In education the ends aren’t given but contested, and deciding among them is exactly the work a democratic society is supposed to do out loud. When “what works” becomes the governing question, that work doesn’t disappear. It gets done quietly, by whoever chose the outcome measure, and then presented as though it were a finding rather than a choice.
Biesta’s later book, Good Education in an Age of Measurement, puts the problem in a line I’ve quoted before: we have started valuing what we measure instead of measuring what we value. I wrote about that book on LinkedIn earlier this year, mostly to work through what his critique of “learner” language meant for someone whose job title and podcast name both contain the word. What I didn’t fully take up then was his argument about purpose. Biesta says education always works in three domains at once: 1) qualification, meaning the knowledge and skills people need, 2) socialization, meaning being brought into existing traditions and ways of doing things, and 3) subjectification, meaning becoming someone who can act and judge rather than only fit in. Nearly everything that gets called research-based is research on the first domain, and usually a thin slice of it. That would be fine if we treated it that way. Instead the evidence about one domain gets used as a verdict on the whole.
Apple and the question underneath
Michael Apple has spent his career on a question that sits underneath all of this. Herbert Spencer asked in 1859 what knowledge is of most worth, and Apple’s move in Ideology and Curriculum was to point out that the question has an unspoken partner: whose knowledge is of most worth, and who gets to decide. Curriculum isn’t a neutral inventory of what is true. It’s a selection, and every selection reflects the interests of the people who made it, whether or not they experience themselves as having interests.
The part of Apple’s work that speaks most directly to “research-based” is his account of how political and ethical questions get converted into technical ones. In the chapter of Ideology and Curriculum on systems management, he describes how the language of efficiency and procedure entered schools with the promise of being value-free, and how that promise did its own ideological work. If a decision can be made to look like a technical determination, then it no longer needs to be argued for. Nobody has to defend the goal, because the goal has been absorbed into the method. The people who disagree aren’t offered a debate so much as a tutorial.
That conversion doesn’t happen on its own. It has a constituency. In Educating the “Right” Way, Apple describes the coalition that reshaped American education from the 1980s onward, and one of its members is easy to overlook because it isn’t obviously ideological: a fraction of the professional and managerial new middle class whose careers are built on accountability, measurement, and management technique. Apple borrows the category from Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who in 1977 named the professional-managerial class as the group whose position depends on expertise in coordinating and evaluating other people’s work rather than doing that work directly. Apple’s observation is that this class can serve almost any political project, because its commitment is to the tools rather than to whatever the tools are turned toward. Testing regimes and standards frameworks needed people to build and run them, and those people gained standing from the fact that the tools were in use.
I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying here. Apple’s argument is structural, not personal. The people he describes are usually sincere, often former teachers, and frequently the most competent people in the building. His point isn’t that they’re villains but that a class whose authority comes from measurement will, in good faith, keep expanding the set of things that get decided by measurement, because that’s where its expertise applies. The purpose question doesn’t have a place in that set, so it slowly stops being asked.
The data class arrives
What Apple described in the standards era has intensified in ways he could only partly anticipate. The measurement apparatus that used to require a state testing office and a research department now lives inside the platforms. A learning management system produces engagement reports. A behavior tool produces dashboards. A curriculum product ships with its own efficacy studies, and federal policy has formalized the tiers those studies fall into. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act defines “evidence-based” in four levels, from strong evidence down to interventions that merely “demonstrate a rationale,” and the What Works Clearinghouse assigns ratings that districts can cite when a purchase needs justifying. Ben Williamson has traced how this data infrastructure has become a governing layer of its own, one in which analytics vendors and the people who read their outputs have as much say over what counts as good teaching as anyone who was elected or hired to decide.
The people who work this layer are the group I’ve started thinking of as “the data class.” It includes the instructional coaches who became data coaches, the assessment coordinators, the MTSS leads whose meetings run on a screen of colored cells, and the platform administrators who configure what gets tracked and generate the reports that go to the state office. I’m in that last group. I set up the reporting structures for a statewide LMS deployment, and I’ve watched how a completion rate, once it exists, becomes the thing the next conversation is about. Nobody decided that completion was what the professional learning was for. The number was simply the one that was available, and available numbers have a way of turning into purposes.
That’s Apple’s technical control in a form he didn’t have the vocabulary for. In Education and Power he described how control moves into the materials and procedures themselves, so that a teacher following a scripted curriculum is being managed by the curriculum without anyone needing to manage them directly. The reporting dashboard does the same thing at the level of the institution. It doesn’t tell anyone what to value. It makes some things visible and others invisible, and it lets the visible things carry the weight of a verdict. “Research-based” is the phrase that greases this. It certifies the visible thing as legitimate and marks the invisible thing as anecdotal, and the person who asks about the invisible thing is, at best, tolerated.
What a purpose conversation sounds like
I taught for a year in a rural district small enough that the school was, in a real sense, the town’s largest institution. Questions about what the school was for weren’t abstract there. They were about whether graduates would leave, what the community wanted its kids to be able to do with their hands and their reading, and what it meant that the same building hosted the basketball games and the funeral lunches. None of that was research-based. All of it was the purpose of the school, as the people who lived around it understood the purpose, and any intervention that worked had to work toward that. A reading program with a strong effect size is a real good in a community like that, but it isn’t the answer to the question the community was actually asking.
This is where I think the “research-based” habit costs the most, and the cost falls unevenly. A large district with a research office can at least argue with the evidence on its own terms. A small district with one curriculum director who also drives a bus has no such capacity. What that district has is a deep local sense of what it wants education to be, and that sense has no standing in a conversation where standing is conferred by evidence tiers. The professional-managerial layer, whether in the state office or the vendor’s sales deck, arrives with the research while the community arrives with its values, and the structure of the conversation has already decided which of those counts as an argument.
James C. Scott would call this legibility, and I’ve written about that lens elsewhere. Apple’s version is more pointed. He would say that the appeal to research, in these settings, isn’t neutral expertise arriving to help. It’s a specific class’s way of knowing being installed as the only way of knowing that gets to speak, and the fact that the installation feels like professionalism rather than politics is exactly what makes it effective.
None of this is an argument against research, because I don’t hold that position and because the history of education is full of what happens when values operate without it. The reading wars are the obvious example. Whole-language instruction was a values commitment, about how children should relate to text, and a generation of kids paid for the fact that its advocates were slow to take seriously the evidence that it was failing many of them. Research-based reading instruction was a correction that was needed, and I’m glad it happened.
There’s a second complication that Apple himself insists on. “Values” isn’t a safe word either. The coalition he describes in Educating the “Right” Way was also, and loudly, a values coalition. It talked about purpose constantly. Its purposes were a particular vision of moral order and a particular account of whose knowledge belonged in schools, and the measurement class was useful to it precisely because measurement could enforce those purposes while appearing to sit above them. So a demand for more values talk in education doesn’t by itself point anywhere good. It depends entirely on whose values, negotiated how, with what room for the people the school is actually for.
What I’m arguing is narrower than research versus values, then. It’s about sequence and about standing. Research can tell us how well a means reaches an end. It can’t choose the end, and when “research-based” is used to close the conversation about ends, it’s doing something the research never licensed. The purpose question has to be asked first, by the people whose purposes are at stake, and the evidence has to be brought in afterward as a servant of that answer rather than a substitute for it. When the order gets reversed, the professional-managerial layer ends up choosing purposes by default, through its choice of what to measure, and everyone downstream experiences that choice as simply the way things are.
Where I actually am with this
It would be easy to end by proposing a framework for purpose conversations, and I’ve resisted that because a framework is exactly the kind of technical instrument that would let the purpose question get managed instead of asked. I don’t have a method so much as a habit I’m trying to break and a question I’m trying to move earlier.
The habit is reaching for “research-based” when I want to win. The question is “toward what,” asked before “does it work,” and asked in a way that leaves room for an answer I didn’t supply. In practice this means that when a district asks me about a platform configuration, I try to ask what they want their teachers’ professional learning to be for before I show them what the reporting can track, and I try to sit with the fact that the honest answer is often “we have not decided,” which is not a problem a dashboard can solve. It also means noticing, in my own work, when a number I built has started making decisions I did not intend it to make.
I expect the purpose question will keep landing as naive in rooms where I raise it. That is the cost Apple’s analysis predicts, and it is the cost of being in the data class while trying not to let it set the terms. I do not have a way around it yet. If you are working the same layer, running the reports and sitting in the meetings where a study gets cited and the conversation ends, I would like to hear how you keep the harder question alive. Reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and find more of my writing at bradylicht.com.
