Education Researchers Are Not Doing the Research Educators Need
Last week we visited a school in Southwest Philadelphia, a public charter school founded and run by an African American educator, operating for two decades in the same building. We were inspired by the school leader’s commitment to his local community and to the students his faculty and staff educate. Like every other school in America, his school faces serious challenges, exacerbated during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The same day, just a few miles away in Center City Philadelphia, the century-old annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) gathered more than 15,000 education researchers. There, despite many professors’ large grants and privileged positions with flexible schedules, remarkably few papers and presentations addressed the issues that ground-level educators like this school leader grapple with every day.
The challenges schools face are many. During the pandemic, students fell behind both academically and socially, while reporting more mental health challenges than ever. Recent exams have confirmed the worst fears of parents and educators. Though varying by age, many math and reading test scores are lower than they’ve been in two decades. As both the and document, long COVID-19 lockdowns had particularly devastating impacts on academic equity, widening achievement gaps.
, and in our fieldwork, teachers say that the students who do show up present serious behavioral challenges. Employers report that new graduates are ill-prepared for the workplace. Scientists fear scientific illiteracy. Civil leaders fear young people do not know how to do pluralistic democracy in the run-up to what is certain to be a divisive presidential election.
Last week, we attended the annual AERA meeting in Philadelphia – a city where we formerly resided. On the first night, AERA’s executive director welcomed us to the “city of sibling love” – a phrase used to avoid gendered language which, though well-intended, very few Philadelphians would grasp. It’s emblematic of the disconnect between AERA’s verbiage and actions, and those of nonelite students and educators.
AERA continued to require attendees to present documentation of COVID-19 vaccinations, despite the fact that the rest of the world had long since moved on. The insistence on keeping attendees “safe” led to hour-long lines to check-in at the conference, something which had historically been a 10-minute exercise. For some this requirement proved challenging since the . Likewise, the conference showed a near-omnipresent disconnect between K-12 public educators and academic research presentations.
Pandemic-era learning loss, which was especially severe for historically marginalized student populations, received little attention at AERA. Using word searches in the conference program, we found more mentions of race (531) than reading (315) and math (192) combined. Fewer presentations directly focused on learning loss (68) than on safe spaces (102) or queer theory (81). More addressed “critical consciousness” (205) than math; more referenced “resistance” (321) than reading. More mentioned sexuality (112) than artificial intelligence (102), with fewer than 20 mentions of chronic student absenteeism, despite the latter being a top priority for school leaders. Cheating, a perennial problem growing worse with cell phones, appears just 8 times. Phonics got just 15 mentions, many of them negative. And every plenary session seemed to focus on critical theory.
We could go on, but you get the picture.
To be clear, we fervently support academic freedom. Further, race, gender, and equity are worthy of study; indeed, we have studied them. We have also spent time in public testimony before the Philadelphia City Council on racism in local education policy and done thousands of hours of service on public boards (a local school board, a U.S. Civil Rights Commission state advisory committee, and a state charter school commission) working to reduce racial and gender inequities in leadership and achievement. Yet identity and equity are not the only areas of study, and postmodern approaches are not the only ways to study them. AERA’s obsession with critical theory shortchanges what many real-world educators and students want and need.
Research one of us conducted for a recent sought to understand the issues that mattered most to teachers. Teachers universally discussed academics, the need for more time, lighter workloads, and support from administrators, colleagues, and parents. The topics that matter most to teachers and leaders who spend their days working in actual schools are not prioritized and are, if you will, deprivileged by AERA. This raises serious concerns about this conference and education research in general.
While we at AERA populated fancy downtown restaurants and hotels, educators in nonelite public schools like the one we visited a few miles away toil away every day to serve students. Those of us in a position to do so should focus research on helping those educators.
We would not go as far as Rick Hess, who recently argued that . Yet, at the risk of sounding wonky, AERA needs a huge paradigmatic realignment. AERA must reform: a greater focus on researcher-practitioner partnerships is a good place to start. Professors who are in conversation with those on the ground doing the work are more likely to align their research with classroom needs.
If AERA chooses to reform, we are here to help.
