In a recent article entitled "why 'What Works' Won't Work" (Educational Theory 57, no. 1, pp. 1-22), Gert Biesta offers an intelligent critique of the theory and practice of evidence-based education. First, he says evidence-based education is technocratic, as questions of ends and values are irrelevant to it. Second, he says evidence-based education fails to see that educative judgments are context-sensitive. Evidence-based research stays at the descriptive level, when the questions it essays to answer are inescapably normative. Biesta's own normative solution, presented in the second half of his article, is to offer an epistemological grounding, drawn from John Dewey. The advantages of Dewey's episte-mology are two. It does not separate questions of research aims from educational practices. Also, it rejects the notion that the only relevant research questions are those related to means and techniques. Biesta's critique of evidence-based education identifies certain key difficulties. What I find troublesome is his belief that Dewey's open-ended epistemology offers a viable solution to the problems left untouched by evidence-based education.
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