Education Research Is No Longer About Education — It's About Impressing Other Researchers
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how education research has become disconnected from K-12 classrooms, focused more on academic publishing than on helping teachers and students.
Key Takeaways
- Research has drifted from practice - Much of education research is written for other academics, not for practitioners
- Impressing peers replaced helping schools - The incentive structure rewards novel findings and citations, not practical impact
- Practitioners need accessible research - Teachers and administrators need research translated into actionable guidance, not buried in journals
Transcript
What is going on with education research?
If you have been following the AERA annual meetings for the last couple of years, you might have noticed some strange themes and you might have noticed that they are increasingly disconnected from anything that has anything to do with K-12 education.
Like, you might think that educational researchers are interested in improving teaching and learning, improving the way schools are run, improving outcomes for students.
But you would be very, very wrong if you thought that.
Look at this call for proposals for the 2026 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.
And the title of this conference is going to be, Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures, Constructing a New Vision for Education Research.
And you can read all these, you know, kind of descriptions of kind of what they're looking for But you'll notice that this language is not designed to communicate at all with K-12 educators and education leaders.
This is all about impressing one another as a research community.
And I have to even question what are they researching that's real in the world?
Like what schools are they going into and actually researching?
What practices are they actually researching?
Because it sounds like education research now is all about impressing other professors, impressing other graduate students, and getting tenure.
And I think that's kind of what has happened over the last couple of years, is that to get a job as an education researcher at a university, in a college of education, you have to do a lot of impressing other education researchers.
And that doesn't necessarily need to have anything at all to do with the world of K-12 education.
So my challenge to education researchers, and I'm trained as an education researcher.
I have a PhD in educational leadership and policy.
I have extensive training in how to conduct education research.
And like, honestly, I don't recognize any of this.
This is all how education researchers talk to one another when they're trying to impress one another, not when they're actually trying to improve the profession.
So my challenge to the field is, please stop this.
Please stop this nonsense where we're just talking in circles.
We're just talking to one another.
We're just trying to impress one another.
Like, one thing you'll notice here is that everything is plural now.
Histories and futures.
Like, we don't have to do that.
We don't have to speak in ways that are inscrutable to everyone else.
We should be talking as experts about how to make the profession better.
better.
We should be studying how to make the profession better for our students.
And we should not be having these meetings where we just go and do presentations to impress one another.
Let me know what you think.