To some extent yes, but I'm a researcher because I care about kids and if we're on the cutting edge that really means we haven't established as much as we should in the field. That means that we don't necessarily know how to best kelp kids. That makes me sad. So cutting edge is exciting and good for researchers but bad for education. Take the medical field, while it's still developing there's a great deal that has been definitely established because of the careful experimentation and standards the field has. To some extent that makes me jealous. It's hard to move a 20 ton ship in a new direction.
However, your interest in children wellbeing is nice, good for your kids : )
An example of the field's knowledge is around reading strategies (tools that we have for comprehending text that we use automatically but don't necessarily think about).
We know that in teaching kids about a reading strategy there are three parts declarative (what the strategy is), procedural(how to use it), and conditional (when and why to use it). In the US we're really good at the first two but not the last (this goes for math teaching too). We need to get better at teaching kids when and why they should use something other wise they're unlikely to use it.
I think that we have a lot of literature in reading education and a lot of beliefs and a lot of opinions but we haven't given them careful scrutiny with hard scientific experimental methods. Our evidence is we cite so and so who cites so and so who cites..
I really want the field to start honestly examining it's beliefs with large experimental studies rather than continuing to debate without the generalizability that other fields like the medical field have.
They know that if they give pill X to patient A, with characteristics M, N, O and P, that he is likely to recover. They know this because they've observed and then carefully tested this hypothesis.
Right now, from my perspective, reading education has a lot of hypothesis but not the focused resources or organization to really test these notions for generalization to a broader audience.
[I wanted to put another smiley and it errored!! "You have included a total of 14 images and/or videos in your message. The maximum number that you may include is 10. Please correct the problem and then continue again." lol [without smileys] : )