I agree - I think it's somewhat cultural. That community has a lot of good ideas, but few fleshed-out solutions, which are harder and require more technical/modeling skills. It's hardly unique to them - education researchers (for instance, as I've been noticing recently) and many administrators are equally quantitatively lacking. Part of it may also be that doing novel critical analysis requires few resources, but doing most novel science is a high-capital endeavor.
angersock|13 years ago
I saw something similar at my local Occupy protests--once we'd put in a somewhat more concrete intellectual framework for discussing grievances, things became a lot more productive.
Hit me up on email if you'd like to chat more about these things.