Balancing Evidence-Based and Humanistic Education in School Development for Underperforming Arizona and South Carolina Schools

Educational policies and research funding sources in many nations, including the United States, promote the use of evidence-based practice for school development, with evidence most often defined by standardized tests. Scholars and educators have engaged in debates regarding the use of evidence defined by tests and the underlying assumptions about universal knowledge and education values, particularly in increasingly culturally diverse nations like the U.S. This paper presents a school development project aimed at building leadership capacity for continuous school development that attempts to use “evidence-based” ideas from the standpoint of education values in persistently underperforming Arizona and South Carolina schools.