Evidence based governance cannot be made by simply sampling statistical data on learner’s achievements and feedbacking the results to schools. There are strong forces which inhibit clear evidence. To name only a few: (1) There are political and status-related interests, which tend to protect and even maximize their own benefits, e.g. to suggest effectiveness and successfulness of own actions while disavowing actions of other actors or groups as less important, insufficient, or even wrong – regardless of observable educational efforts or failures. Additionally, they tend to functionalize educational system’s reforms for preconceived external ends, so what counts as “evidence” for good or bad efforts is precast by political definitions and not extracted from the educational process itself. (2) The effects of many pedagogical actions still are not easily to be judged, let alone to be measured. Catchwords are: complexity of educational situations; the role of collective and informal learning; implicit, tacit, and practical knowledge; the problematic knowledge transfer between school, science, and politics, and so on. Still, there is a lack of empirically grounded, theoretically reflected models of competency building and learning processes. (3) In school systems, there are mechanisms and dynamics of social self organization which are not planned or intended, but coining both system’s performance structure and its governance structure. E.g., we find typical power mechanisms between vocational groups and between pedagogical and political actors etc., we find teaching staff’s routinized treatments for reforms which encapsulate them in traditional institutional structures, we find schools copying practices of other schools which are believed to be successful without testing their functionality and their fitting in school’s institutional structures etc. These and more points show that the construction of evidence based governance structures does not go without saying. The symposium will discuss in a deeper and more fine-grained way, what can be understood as an adequate evidence of learner's, school’s, and school system’s performances – and how such evident results can be transformed into governance structures.

Qualitative Research Methods will be used, especially observations, historical document analysis, and heuristic structure analysis. The empirical groundings of the contributions shall be both guided by theories which concentrate on informal, transintentional coordination patterns (e.g. Neo-Institutionalism, Actor Network Theory, relational sociology, mechanism based approach) and, in a grounded theory manner, creating new explanation models about institutional mechanisms which trigger and obviate evidence – and what kind of evidence – about institution’s and learner’s performance outcomes.

The symposium aims at an account of covered or hidden parts of schools and school systems, the role of which for successful governance reforms tends to be underestimated: informal self-organization and learning processes, trans-intentional mechanisms of coordination, tacit and implicit rules of behaviour and competencies. The account may serve as a first clue to underlying coordination processes and mechanisms of the school system which strongly influence the outcomes of learner’s, school's, and even whole school system's performances, but are not captured by contemporary quantitative-empirical mass data about student’s performances and attributes.