In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is how values shape educational research.
—Rick
Jal: With the Trump administration clapping back against anything that could be considered “leftist” research, our topic today is the nature of education research itself. Is it as biased as its critics say? Is it a search for veritas that has been unfairly characterized and targeted by a right-wing government? Is it both?
I think it is fair to say that values shape research at virtually all stages of the process. Values shape what researchers find interesting and what will carry weight with their colleagues. This, in turn, is shaped by the broader political, social, and cultural environment. In the past few years, shaped heavily by the Black Lives Matter movement, we’ve seen a lot of education research focusing on anti-racism, equity-driven leadership, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Go back a few years, and you would have seen a lot of research on Common Core implementation and, before that, the consequences of No Child Left Behind. No doubt, in a few years, we will see studies of resistance to an authoritarian regime and social-movement organizers, and, among the more centrist folks, research on political polarization and the decline of civic discourse.
Now, as sociologist Max Weber would put it, do values shape research only through the topics that researchers take up or also through the conclusions that they draw? This is a thorny and difficult question. On social and political questions, it is impossible to remove one’s values from how one analyzes the world. For example, when Nathan Glazer wrote The Limits of Social Policy, it has to be understood within the context of Glazer’s position as a neoconservative skeptical of the promises of the liberal state; similarly, when Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, it has to be understood in the context of his socialist commitments to a more egalitarian society.
But still, I think the nature of the research enterprise creates some limits. At least among mainstream, well-respected scholars who publish books and journals with reputable presses, the norms of peer review mean that certain standards are applied to whether the methods match the questions, whether the inferences can be supported by the evidence, and whether the work builds sufficiently on previous research. Values can creep in there, too, but part of where critics of the academy get it wrong is to assume that the influence of values means no standards have been applied to the academic work.
Rick: You’ve raised a timely topic, pal. On this one, I start from a much more skeptical place than you do, probably due to personal experience. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was urged to leave the University of Virginia, one of the big issues was anger at my work critiquing teacher licensure or making the case for the benefits of choice-based competition. Indeed, it was cited as evidence that I was a self-hating education scholar who lacked collegiality. That was about the time my mentor, Paul Peterson, was moved to launch a new journal, Education Next, in large part because the existing journals kept rejecting research that found positive effects of school vouchers (while publishing anti-voucher studies)—seemingly irrespective of methodological rigor. I’d venture to say that it has gotten steadily worse over time.
I’ve long observed a heavy thumb on the scale as to which areas of inquiry are deemed interesting or important. On a host of topics—including school discipline, affirmative action, gender identity, notions of “equity,” and vouchers and education savings accounts—the university-based research community tends to sing from a shared hymnal. Dissenting takes are relegated to conservative think tanks or advocacy groups. Now, there’s plenty of room to run if you’re pursuing hyper-technical analyses without obvious implications for policy or practice. And there’s space for competing research on chronic absenteeism, school board governance, special ed. interventions, or social-emotional-learning implementation. But on major social, political, and cultural questions, I find that progressive groupthink is the norm.
Meanwhile, professional associations, leading journals, hiring committees, and grant-review committees have institutionalized mechanisms that squelch competing views. I mean, the American Educational Research Association recently released its 2026 conference call for papers, and much of the list of recommended topics could’ve been crafted by a left-wing advocacy group: “Teaching and learning in an era of polycrisis; neurodiversity and ability justice; climate justice and sustainability; restorative and transformative justice; [and] equity-oriented scholarship examining intersectionality of race, class, gender identity, and abilities.” That list might as well be subtitled, “Only ‘leftist’ research welcome here.”
Do I think all education scholars are “leftists”? No, I don’t. But I do think those who dominate the commanding heights of the field have made it clear that certain kinds of questions, assumptions, and language are a recipe for professional success. And I fear that aspiring scholars have learned it’s best to go along.
Jal: Let’s take up this idea of going along to get along. I just went to a memorial service for my dissertation adviser, Christopher “Sandy” Jencks, who wrote many highly respected, if controversial, books over the years. One theme of the service, as revealed by those who knew him from the 1960s to the present, was his determination to follow the facts wherever they led, even if the conclusions were politically inconvenient. He authored studies showing that funding wasn’t highly correlated with school outcomes, that the low levels of spending on welfare led many recipients to lie and cheat, and that homelessness wasn’t as driven by housing policy as many had thought. All of these analyses cost him friends among people on the left. But in the longer run, they also helped us think realistically about the nature of our social problems and what could be done to address them.
Similarly, my undergraduate thesis adviser, William Julius Wilson, wrote a book in 1979 called The Declining Significance of Race, which, unsurprisingly, makes him a persona non grata in large segments of the Black community to this day. Wilson was even invited to the White House by Ronald Reagan; he declined, saying that Reagan’s minders hadn’t looked beyond the title to realize that he was a social democrat who believed in New Deal liberalism. (The book was initially titled The Rising Significance of Class, but the press thought no one would buy that book.) Both Jencks and Wilson have my full respect because they had the courage to say what they thought was true, even though they knew that would come with considerable social and political costs.
I think there is a lesson here for all of us. In the short term, it may be easier to shade the truth in ways that are likely to be palatable to our friends and social circles; however, in the long run, it is important to tell the truth as we see it. During the height of the anti-racism era after George Floyd’s murder, for example, I knew, deep down, that class continues to be as powerful a dividing line as race in American society. (I was a Wilson student, after all.) I also knew, deep down, that workshops that focused almost exclusively on teaching white people to feel guilty about their privilege were not a promising way to achieve racial progress. And I said these things, but hesitantly and occasionally—in retrospect, I wish I would have followed my mentors’ examples and been braver in sharing what I thought when I thought it.
Rick: I appreciate your take here, my friend, especially because we can all look back at those times when we wish we’d been braver. But my concern isn’t with pointing the finger at any faculty member—and certainly not you! I’m not even sure the conversation is about “values” so much as it is about institutional pressures and professional culture.
While I wish it were otherwise, it’s unreasonable to expect a single professor to stand up in lonely defense of free inquiry and intellectual heterodoxy. It’s too easy to be shouted down and shamed, knowing their professional future is on the line. That’s why those who lead institutions, associations, and foundations need to stand up and defend those principles. At that, they’ve failed miserably. Heck, many haven’t even tried, preferring to celebrate the hot passions of movement politics than the cold principles of robust scholarship.
The result has been predictable. Back in 2013, I launched an annual three-day Education Policy Academy for graduate students. It was a chance to introduce 20 highly regarded (overwhelmingly progressive) young scholars to a handful of provocative but respected education figures and have the kinds of heterodox conversations about educational choice, cost-effectiveness, or the value of homework that participants said they rarely experienced on campus. At first, it was heartening work.
And yet, we pulled the plug on it a year ago. Why? Because, over time, the conversations increasingly got stuck in two-dimensional platitudes regarding race, gender, oppression, and equity. Many participants would quietly voice concerns or dissenting views to me over drinks, but they swallowed their concerns around the seminar table—allowing just a couple of ideologues to somehow shape the conversation. I’ve encountered that sort of thing far too frequently to imagine that all education researchers are leftists.
But until there are efforts to address the professional incentives, institutional choke points, and groupthink culture, I fear that we’re likely to see far too few scholars like Sandy Jencks, William Julius Wilson, and Paul Peterson. The result will be bad for research, education, and the public discourse.
2025-07-15 10:00:00
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