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Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.
Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.
It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.
This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.
I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.
The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.
Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.
100%. And it's particularly bad in humanities where over-subdivision is ridiculous. I think the British University's still have PPE as a sort of default humanities major - that's politics, philosophy, and economics. Which, when you stop to think about it, are all intrinsically related and, therefore, necessary to be taught together. In a sort of dark hilarity "intersectionality" is a weird bottom-up recreation of ... sociology (which, to be clear, is anthropology without the field work and economics without the math).
Part of this has to do with the relentless credentialism. I went to a fancy kid college and there were classmates I had who wanted to take STEM courses from genuine interest but worried they would struggle and their GPA would fall. The idea of college GPA is absurd to me because it can be hacked and demonstrates ZERO proficiency at anything. Take the courses you want, attend however you feel. Senior year should be an independent project that you publish publicly ... employers can make their determination based on that.
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