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This article questions the pedagogical authority invested in members of the Evidence-Based Practice and Policy (EBPP) movement. Using Bourdieu’s concept of field, we seek to analyze how this authority is based, in part, on political and axiological criteria. The question of empirical evidence in education is therefore not exclusively a question of epistemology and methodological rigor. Through an analysis of the institutionalization of the field of educational research in the USA, it is argued that EBPP in the USA is not so much a novelty as a resurgence of a vision of research that was marginalized in the 1980s after a struggle for domination of the field. Nevertheless, by adopting medical treatment as the regulating ideal, EBPP marks a shift away from the tradition of field experiment in US education at the micro level. This shift takes the form of short-term intervention programs with the goal of improving the performance of specific categories of the school population defined according to their particular difficulties/needs. By accumulating significant political capital, the EBPP movement in the US has imposed its dominance on the field of educational research and a normative vision of research. On the basis of this analysis, various issues are raised with regard to the institutionalization of EBPP in Quebec, highlighting more specifically a managerial regulation of pedagogy in reference to the managerialization of medical practice as a consequence of evidence-based medicine, which is set up as a model for the rationalization of professional practices, management practices and political practices in the field of health by the proponents of EBPP in education.