This article offers a philosophical contribution to recent debates about the assessment of quality in educational research. It shows how criticisms of the quality of educational research--pointing to its failure to meet epistemic criteria of rigour and practical criteria of relevance--are an inevitable manifestation of the flawed assumption that educational research is to be understood as a species of modern social science. It draws on Furlong and Oancea's study of quality in practice-based research, Gadamer's critique of modern social science and Lagemann's historical account of the origins and evolution of educational research in the USA, to argue for a reconstruction of educational research as a species of Aristotelian practical science.