Policy evaluation in education in France: Going beyond the state sciences model?
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The global aim of this article is to question the evolution of the relations between knowledge and policy in the education sector and their possible effects on the current regulation of the educational systems. To do so, I focus on the policy evaluation led in education in France at the national level since the 1980s. My thesis is that in the policy evaluation of French education a particular type of knowledge production predominates, which can be understood as specific «state sciences». Through materials drawn from three main qualitative studies, two of them conducted within and for the Knowandpol Project, the article highlights the weight of state elites on the production of knowledge in the evaluation field and their particular methods of analysis. Then it stresses the key factors of explanation of the predominance of this state sciences model and its main implications on the current French education policy process.
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