Do Educational Organizations Have Any Clue?

Recently a post by the Canadian Education Association (CEA) came across my desk. It was titled "The Facts on Education: Is Inquiry-Based Learning Effective?" so of course I was curious to see what the CEA had to say. The full post can be found here. And the sources referenced can be found here.

What I want to focus on is how the educational organizations have no clue about how to properly teach children. Let's analyse this passage:

So they begin by stating that inquiry-based activities can boost "learning" yet they have decided not to define what they mean by "learning." I admit that I did take the time to search Sharon Friesen's literature review on inquiry-based learning since she was listed as a reference (She submitted this review to the Alberta government by the way, completely ignoring any research that didn't support her viewpoint surprise surprise.).  This literature review had 254 instances of the word "learning," yet Dr. Friesen failed to define "learning" once. How can one discuss inquiry-based learning if one doesn't know what "learning" even means? Very peculiar. Seems like the CEA is doing this in the above paragraph as well. How can we trust the CEA that inquiry-based activities can boost "learning" if they have failed to define it?

The CEA continues down the rabbit hole by stating that unguided or minimally-guided inquiry may not work with students who have less previous knowledge. They even mention that "learning" may be blocked, or misconceptions may arise, if inquiry-based methods are used. In these couple sentences they are definitely referring to the referenced work of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark. This seems very odd to me - why go out of your way to claim that inquiry methods are excellent, then reference a paper that argues against what you are trying to state? Kirschner, Sweller and Clark give a very good argument as to why student lessons should be scaffolded with many worked examples - which tends to be the opposite to inquiry-based methods. In fact there is a large body of knowledge (not just from cognitive psychology) that has found explicit instruction to be superior to non-explicit instruction (like inquiry-based learning). See this post by @greg_ashman for a bit more to this picture. So it seems to me as if the CEA really doesn't understand the research properly. It is even more apparent that they are clueless when they make the following absurd claim:

According to the CEA About Us page, their mission is to "transform public education by ... disseminating research that can impact practice." Seems to me as if they are preaching the usual "fuzzy" ideals we see from many educationalists. Do we really need "professional" organizations like this distributing biased research to our teachers and government?