From this exchange:

What I fear most is that education research will come to be done primarily by social science specialists prepared in academic disciplines who know little about everyday life in schools and thus are unable to pursue questions of genuine educational imagination. I fear that they would act as social science mandarins with the power to dictate detailed behaviors to teachers, further constraining the professional discretionary authority of frontline school practitioners—teachers and principals—rather than supporting that authority and informing everyday practice in ways that make sense to practitioners. Given the extremely regressive relationship between management and frontline service provision in schools—as I will describe in my second-round comments—I see the trend toward outsourcing education research to a social scientific mandarinate as elitist, dangerous, and wrong.

Spending the morning with an old friend — The One Best System by David Tyack — and (re) found this quote from John Dewey regarding the use of intelligence tests:

“Our mechanical, industrialized civilization is concerned with averages, not percents. The mental habit which reflects this social scene subordinates education and social arrangements based on averaged gross inferiorities and superiorities….the schools apparently “welcome a procedure which under the title of science sinks the individual in a numerical class…”

Tyack, David. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. 198.

Dewey, John. “Indidviduality, Equality, and Superiority.” New Republic, 33 (Dec. 13, 1922), 61-63.