Evidence-based state literacy policy: A critical alternative

Abstract

This chapter is a narrative account of policy making, an auto-ethnography that describes both arbitrariness and motivated 'play' of discourse in the sites of local policy development. I use this to make a case for evidence-based educational policy. But I argue that such an approach should be based on a rich, multiperspectival hermeneutic social science, rather than the narrow positivist approaches advocated in the US and UK. I then describe L iterate Futures (2000), the Queensland State literacy strategy developed with Peter Freebody and Ray Land. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the strategy four years on. Drawing on sociological models of capital (Albright & Luke, in press; Bourdieu, 1992), I make the case for the making of literacy-in-education policy as a subset of sustainable, broader educational, social and economic policy.