This paper discusses the ways in which both globalisation's advocates and critics see an inevitability in the spread of neo-liberal education policy from the traditional Western and Northern 'centres' to the margins and peripheries of post colonial settings and education systems. This assumption is reflected in the prescriptions for educational reform and policy tied to World bank structural adjustment programmes, in the funding parameters of increasingly influential NGOs, in the paradigms and models of educational research undertaken internationally, and, as well, in critiques of the spread of marketization, corporatisation, decentralization and accountability by critical scholars. These new systems and models are themselves the products of particular poltical economies, state formations and educational histories in the West. To suggest that they have salience when transplanted to other settings may be economically and sociologically naïve. This paper looks at educational reform in two radically different contexts-Queensland and Singapore in order to suggest that evidence-based policy need not be seen as the extension of neo-liberal, market bsed educational reform.