Introduction

If nothing else, debates around education in the “noughts” have been focused on questions of evidence. Among other things, the fi rst decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of the National Research Counsel (NRC) and its push for scientifi cally based research, the federal establishment of the Institute for Education Science (IES), as well as the IES’s commission of the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, and the Cochrane-Campbell-What Works Clearinghouse. Linked to the rise of high-stakes testing, this “new orthodoxy” has enshrined a particular kind of “gold standard” for social scientifi c research in education-experimental research designs which lean heavily on randomized control groups (Baez & Boyles, 2009; Denzin & Giardina, 2008).