ABSTRACT
Currently, there is an abundance of information about the quality of schools and school systems based on large-scale international studies, which are often combined with comparisons between schools and nations in a quest to identify a ‘best practice’ that might fit all. This book, on the other hand, consists of small individual case studies across five national contexts. Such cases can hardly provide true or comprehensive insight into evaluation policies and practices, but they provide descriptions of practices to aid in critically examining current evaluation practices. Thus, our aim is to contribute to thinking about evaluation practices, their purposes, the values they lean on and possible methodologies. The cases are meant to be tools for reflection that will support and promote agency, and encourage the creation of communities of learning for education leaders. Descriptive cases from different contexts will support readers, not only in developing their practice and contexts but also in reasserting their capability of both knowing and evaluating what really matters in education. The purpose of the chapters in this book is to describe how people in different contexts ‘do’ educational evaluation, how they think about what they are doing and to discuss why evaluation happens in this way.
