OP's political undertones aside, schools like Stanford and MIT fake a lot of data. I have zero ability to tell a school that some study they're relying on is f

OP's political undertones aside, schools like Stanford and MIT fake a lot of data. I have zero ability to tell a school that some study they're relying on is faked if the author is at an elite school. This specific rot is in universities and not local to school districts. The most common scientific method used for most high-impact education research: 1. Pick a story people (teachers, parents, journalists, fellow academics) want to hear. 2. Bake data to support it. 3. Publish it. 4. See people pick up on it. 5. Tenure. Other domains of research have related, but different, scientific methods. There is rot local to school districts, but it's not the same rot. This stuff hurts kids. I'm increasingly moving towards the strict liability side of the debate. If a university publishes results like this, and my district wastes a million dollars on pseudoscience in reliance on that research, that ought to come back as damages. Ditto for people harmed by bad medical research and other domains. All of this would happen just as surely if the universities were staffed by conservatives as by liberals. It's how we've set up incentives.