{"id":345,"date":"2010-10-31T18:50:43","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T18:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=345"},"modified":"2010-11-03T11:22:48","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T11:22:48","slug":"policy-based-evidence-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"Policy-based Evidence-making"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many of my colleagues across the UK, I’ve been in a state of shock for the past few weeks, reeling from the proposals in the Browne report<\/a> for the massive restructuring of academia, which includes shifting education from being funded as public good, with benefits accruing to society as a whole, to being funded as a market, where students act as rational consumers and “competition drives quality.”<\/p>\n

Beyond the fact that this strategy is weak and technocentric, as John Naughton<\/a> suggests, it is also problematic in another way.\u00a0 We KNOW that public goods do not accrue using the logic of the market.\u00a0 We KNOW that students don’t act as rational consumers.\u00a0 Thus, this is a proposal made entirely on ideology, not on evidence.<\/p>\n

This means that instead of making evidence-based policy, we are going to start seeing policy-based evidence.\u00a0 In a mad rush to make reality conform to narrow assumptions, it’s quite likely that the actual benefits of public education will stop being measured.\u00a0 Society won’t just be weaker and thinner, we won’t necessarily even know about it.<\/p>\n

History provides numerous lessons about how tenacious policy-based evidence-making can be.\u00a0 For example, Marilyn Waring has proven that economic success (even of developed nations) has depended on unpaid labour, often done by women.\u00a0 She calls the systematic lack of measurement of this labour the “patriarchal economic paradigm.”<\/p>\n

Canada’s census will stop measuring unpaid labour, under new rules made by its Conservative government.\u00a0 In a Toronto Star article<\/a>, Waring comments on this decision:<\/p>\n

\u201cI see this mirrored in so many conservative governments in the post-recession period,\u2019\u2019 says Waring. \u201cThey want to rule according to ideology not according to evidence. So one of the most important things they can do is to obliterate evidence so they can operate on the basis of propaganda.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

From higher education to labour force statistics, the public is going to have to start paying attention.\u00a0 All governments would like to make decisions based only on their ideologies.\u00a0 But responsible ones use evidence to check that ideology and prevent it from having too much influence.\u00a0 Beware of policy-based evidence-making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many of my colleagues across the UK, I’ve been in a state of shock for the past few weeks, reeling from the proposals in the Browne report for the massive restructuring of academia, which includes shifting education from being funded as public good, with benefits accruing to society as a whole, to being funded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19,21,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oii","category-policy","category-the-unexamined-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pUfdR-5z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}