Abstract:

In this paper we intend to summarize the state of the art of the Evidence-based Education Policies (EBEP) in Spain. In recent years, Education policies and educational systems all around the world are coming under increasing pressure to show greater accountability and effectiveness since education systems are not providing young people with the basic skills (cognitive and behavioral) that make them trainable (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2014a, 2014b; The World Bank, 2010; UNESCO, 2012).

Public authorities have a duty to improve governance by ensuring that the qualities of individual institutions, and their education system as a whole, are fit for purpose. People do not want education to continue being a political football; they want education policy to be based on pragmatic, evidence-based approaches that will help all children achieve their highest potential (Shahjahan, 2011). Thus, there have been many calls for Education policy to follow other fields in placing far greater reliance on evidence as a basis for adoption of programs and practices.

However, throughout the history of education, the adoption of instructional programs and practices has been driven more by ideology, faddism, politics, and marketing than by evidence (Slavin, 2008). The direction of change in educational thinking and practice has been top-down from central governments, think tanks, opinion formers, educational regulators, the media, and academic departments, whose research has been often selective, unsystematic, and prone to political or scientific bias (or both) (Davies, 1999). Consequently, variations in educational outcomes should be considered undesirable because they reflect the lack of consistency of quality and, more fundamentally, inequalities of service provision. Significant variations between geographical areas within a country could be partially translated into variations between professionals (educators, practitioners and policy makers) in how they practice (Fox, 2011; Freeman & Simonsen, 2015).

Unfortunately, the state of current knowledge of what works in education in our country is unclear. This makes the information available for policy-making often unsuitable, either because the rigorous research required for policy needs has not been conducted, or because the research that is available is contradictory and suggests more than a single course of action.

To reverse or change this situation our study sets the following three objectives:
a) what it takes to prepare evidences (e.g., identifying government capacity to build evidences including coordination among departments);
b) what it takes to building evidence by government agencies, professionals and researchers (e.g., enhancing the quality and transparency of educational research in all the stages, that is, designing, conducting, analyzing, reporting, registering, indexing, classifying, appraising, and accessing); and
c) what it takes to mediate and use evidence by policymakers (e.g., disseminating “translated” research results through networks, websites, using evidence to design policies).

The use of a mixed methods approach (Levitt et al., 2018) will allow the collection and integration of qualitative and quantitative necessary data. The results will be organized around what progress has been made so far on the objectives set and what are the barriers and potential bias to make a reality the design, implementation and evaluation of EBEP in Spain.

Keywords:

Evidence-based Education Policy, Governance, High-quality Evaluation Research, Program Evaluation, Education.