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.