From April 11-14, the American Educational Research Association will be gathering in Philadelphia for their annual meeting. Given massive learning loss and plunging faith in higher education, the challenges confronting the “world’s largest education research organization” are real.
, the challenges confronting the “world’s largest education research organization” are real. The list of topics calling for rigorous inquiry is staggering: exploding absenteeism, artificial intelligence, the effects of cellphones and social media, chaotic classrooms, the impact of new laws expanding school choice and science-based reading, the cost of college, and the state of free inquiry on campus, to name a few.
There’s much useful research to be done and free-flowing debate that’s needed. Unfortunately, AERA is more interested in progressive jeremiads than in doing such work. This year’sis titled “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action,” and AERA isn’t even trying to elide the politics of the affair. The “Call to Action” title is fitting: It’s very clear that the point of the gathering is to proselytize rather than to ponder.
All of this serves to raise two very practical questions: Why should taxpayers be subsidizing this outfit, and why should public officials accord it any weight?If AERA were strictly a private entity, this would all be troubling enough. But AERA is not a strictly private entity. Itwith the National Science Foundation to award research grants. It is funded in significant part by membership fees, subscriptions to its journals, and faculty travel budgets.
Federal entities should stop partnering with AERA, and Congress should insist that no more research funding flow to the organization. The legislators who fund public colleges and the trustees who oversee colleges and universities should find better uses for the funds that currently make their way to AERA’s politicized coffers. There’s no reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing “research organizations” that eschew research for ideological advocacy.
Rick Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute , where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.
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