We are in a time when education school faculties internationally have become too timid to challenge the institutional norms. The education research establishment decries it as legitimizing craft knowledge rather than demanding the use of professional knowledge. Unfortunately, a literature search uncovers less than a handful of empirical studies on reading tutors that address the problem. What one would find in the literature are plenty of scholars in the field of reading arguing one approach to reading over another, without much data to support their arguments. But that has become the cost of being serfs in the academic net.
Theoretical arguments replace practical argument.
In the current climate of education reform, renewal, restructuring, or transformation, these norms, strong on dispassionate problem identification and comparatively weak on solutions, are simultaneously no longer acceptable and hard to reset. The faculties in schools of education who will thrive in the information economy, and in the contemporary universities that are increasingly under attack for lack of public accountability, are those who eschew the norms of traditional scholarship and build their programs, their scholarship, and their reward structures around public confidence. Such changes would mean testing solutions to knotty problems of teaching, learning, children, schools, and families. To do so would mean growing beyond analytic scholarship and into active or applied scholarship. That serves as a poor excuse for worrying about things we cannot change and not worrying about those things about which we have some powerful statements to make.