What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?

Abstract

This article has two chief purposes. It presents a substantive reappraisal of a decade of school choice research in the UK. This reappraisal is used as a case study illustrating the elasticity of the notion of social science ‘evidence’, when wielded by academics in an area where strong ideological preconceptions struggle with the lack of a sound quantitative tradition of research. The focus here is on the changing socio‐economic compositions of schools in an era of choice. A prediction from theory and from small‐scale studies had been that schools in England and Wales would become more segregated in terms of indicators of socio‐economic disadvantage after the Education Reform Act 1988. The first large‐scale study of the actual compositions of schools suggested that this did not happen. This study was then subjected by a majority of UK academics in the field to a level of criticism that was not applied by them to subsequent, but seemingly inferior, studies that reached an opposite conclusion. The criticism involved widespread misquotation and misunderstanding that was not picked up by ‘peer’ review. What, therefore, counts as evidence in the school choice debate?

Notes

1. Through, for example, the mixing of re‐analyses of official national statistics with in‐depth explanatory case studies. Interestingly, although the in‐depth components of the Cardiff study are, by themselves, larger than many of the single‐method ‘qualitative’ studies cited as being in opposition, they are ignored by the commentators discussed in this article.

2. Some of our work has been cited in a more recent book by Ball (2003, p. 33), where he mistakenly attributes a quotation to Gorard (1997). The quotation, or anything like it, does not appear in the book, which stems from another project (Gorard's Ph.D.) Other than that, Ball cites the usual list of gainsaying studies, using the writings of Noden (2000) and Gibson and Asthana (2000) among others, to critique the Cardiff findings, but without any critique of these studies in turn.

3. Most of the studies cited by Adnett and Davies as producing contradictory evidence to ours are discussed in more detail in this article. The working paper they cite by Bradley and Taylor (2000) showed that LEA‐controlled schools in metropolitan areas increased their FSM‐eligible students from 27% of intake in 1993 to 30% in 1999 (p. 26). Bradley and Taylor use this evidence to support their conclusion that ‘differences in the social segregation of schools have widened during the 1990s’ (p. 8). However, this analysis takes no account of changes over time in the percentage of FSM‐eligible students. Their data also show that FSM‐eligible students increased overall from 1993 to 1999, predominantly in metropolitan areas. The changes they note, therefore, are due to an official increase in poverty between 1993 and 1999 and are not related to the school allocation procedure at all. But as with so many of the examples described in this article, the ‘result’ that segregation has increased is used by other authors to gainsay our findings without even superficial consideration of the nature of the evidence involved.

4. Although some commentators find puzzling the explicit presentation of plausible alternative explanations for the same observed phenomena, this sceptical habit actually forms an essential part of any warranted claims to knowledge (Gorard, 2002b).