ABSTRACT
This Chapter compares two courses of action in preparing students to meet the literacy demands of a rapidly changing society. It follows evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence in the context of reading education across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Through critical pragmatism, the author shows how powers like science, business, and government worked to create and maintain evidence-based practice as the common sense of reading education and to suppress its alternative, practice-based evidence. The result is a successful, but unjust, reading education system that serves social classes differently. The Chapter concludes with a call to commit to the complexities of schooling, the equal moral worth of all students, and development of human teaching capacities.
