Earlier this week IPPR published a paper which made the case against for-profit schools. Two of the leading proponents of such schools, Toby Young and Gabriel Sahlgren, have since responded.
Young accuses me of being ‘an evangelical believer in an ‘evidence-based’ approach to public policy’. He implies at the start of his piece that empirical evidence should play little part in policy development. Confusingly he goes on to set out which types of empirical analysis he values and which he doesn’t. It is unclear from this what role he thinks evidence should play in policymaking.
Young is particularly scathing about the use of cross-national evidence. He is right that we should be wary of looking at the effect of a policy in one country and simply concluding that it would work in another. But this is one of the main points I make in the paper: the evidence on commercial school providers is limited to a small number of cases and we should be careful about drawing hard and fast conclusions.
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