What works, what doesn’t, and why we can’t tell the difference: Contextualizing evidence-based practice in public education and school psychology.

Public schools are charged with educating every child who enters them under a legal and ethical mandate that practice be grounded in evidence, yet the gap between that mandate and routine practice remains substantial across public education. Using school psychology as a case study, we argue that evidence-based practice's (EBP) persistent failure to close this gap reflects a mismatch between the inherited framework and the structural and institutional conditions of public education, rather than practitioner values alone. Six interrelated failures are documented: conflation of EBP as a decision-making model with specific intervention adoption; inconsistent evidentiary standards; demographic mismatch between research samples and served populations; commercial capture of the evidence infrastructure; failures of contextual fit and transportability; and the absence of mechanisms for discontinuing ineffective practices. These failures persist through professional ossification and school psychology's location within education bureaucracies. In response, we propose an epistemological architecture adapted from evidence-based public health, operationalized here as the evidence-based school psychology (EBSP) model, with a three-level evidentiary sequence that provides the de-implementation mechanism the current framework structurally lacks. We offer recommendations for practitioners, trainers, and researchers to operationalize this model in practice.