Evidence-based policy practices have become increasingly popular in education over the last decades. In Flanders (Belgium), for instance, performance measures, standards and examples of good practice increasingly function as a common ground to talk about education today. These measures, standards and examples are, however, not just collected in order to create an evidence base for policy preparation and political decision making. Rather, through instruments such as feedback reports, publically consultable audits and good practices, the distribution of evidence becomes part of Flanders’ educational governance. Such tendencies and developments do not apply to Flanders alone, but have been broadly recognized in the research literature on education policy. The same applies to the instruments and conceptual tools (European as well as international) that assist in shaping and conducting policy founded on sound evidence, such as standards, benchmarks, examples of good practice, international comparable databases and concomitant global assessment tests such as PISA and TIMSS, and so forth.

Drawing on some conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this contribution investigates how precisely data, information and knowledge are elevated to the status of evidence. The objects of analysis consisted of three websites, each exemplifying a specific type of governing by evidence as it is conducted in Flanders nowadays: a website of a policy initiative of bottom-up innovation by means of the provision of examples of good practice; the official website of the inspectorate; and a website promoting school feedback as incentive for school improvement. In line with this socio-technical approach, each website was approached as an active device not only doing things itself, but also making the visitors of these websites perform particular actions. In this contribution, we attempt to map the assemblages of these three different websites and, in so doing, to address the following research interests: Which operations does each website, as particular heterogeneous assemblage, perform? How are data and information being staged as evidence? How does each website address its visitors? In sum, we argue that on each website, different social and technical operations are performed that turn information into evidence, and, at once, stage different modes of schools to exist.

Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. 2002. The economy of qualities. Economy and society 31 (2): 194-217. Davies, Philip. 1999. What is evidence-based education? British Journal of Educational Studies 47 (2): 108-121. Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Fenwick, Tara. 2010. (un)Doing standards in education with actor‐network theory. Journal of Education Policy 25 (2): 117-133. Grek, Sotiria. 2009. Governing by numbers: the PISA 'effect' in Europe. Journal of Education Policy 24 (1): 23-37. Gorur, Radhika. 2010. ANT on the PISA trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43(1): 76-93. Higgins, Vaughan, and Wendy Larner, eds. 2010. Calculating the Social. Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Koyama, Jill. 2011. Generating, comparing, manipulating, categorizing: reporting, and sometimes fabricating data to comply with No Child Left Behind mandates. Journal of Education Policy 26 (5): 701-720. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-theory. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Law, John. 2009. Actor network theory and material semiotics. In The new Blackwell companion to social theory, edited by Bryan Turner, 141-58. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Nimmo, Richie. 2011. Actor-network theory and methodology: social research in a more-than-human world. Methodological Innovations Online 6 (3): 108-119. Rose, Nikolas. 1991. Governing by Numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (7): 673-692. Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. The cosmopolitical proposal. In Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.