ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how evidence-based education functions as one of the neoconservative strategies. It offers an opportunity for educators at all levels of American schooling to forge an unprecedented alliance for mounting a concentrated campaign to increase public awareness and resistance to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies. The chapter examines evidence-based medicine, which provided the original model of neoliberal reform that inspired evidence-based education. In light of the strength of higher education's historical commitment to academic freedom, the pending pressures from the federal government to standardize university teaching will likely meet greater organized resistance from university faculty than they met initially from K-12 teachers. In order to understand what evidence-based education is and what the implications are for educators, it is necessary to look to what happened in medicine for the "evidence". Evidence-based education — standardized tests, standardized measures, prescriptive outcomes, and prescribed methodologies — makes little sense when dealing with human actions and interactions.
