Jeffrey Henig, Spin Cycle: How Research is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
C harter schools are the marvels of contemporary American educa- tion, having gone from virtual obscurity just 15 years ago, to now numbering about 4000 schools, and enlisting US presidents among their supporters.Their aim is to make public education more accountable, innovative, and decentralized.Charter school laws grant funds and operating autonomy to a variety of providers in exchange for their compliance with a distinct mandate, such as serving specific populations, offering unique pedagogies, or meeting various performance indicators.These schools are a lesser phenomenon in Canada, with only a dozen such entities currently operating in Alberta, and having been discussed in policy circles in only a few other provinces.The social forces that make these schools far more popular and controversial in the United States provide the focus of this book.Jeffrey Henig's thoughtful, engaging, and informed book uses the American debate on charter schools to speak to the wider role of research in democratic deliberation.At local levels, supporters champion these schools as escape routes from ineffective school boards, while opponents see them as diverting scarce funds from needy public schools.At the national level, this debate takes on a deeper ideological tenor.Supporters tout charter schools as emblems of much-needed market incentives in education, and as permanent solutions to the inherent failings of public bureaucracy.Opponents see charter schools as an initial step onto a slippery slope of full-blown privatization that can only exacerbate social inequalities and undermine civic cohesion.Henig's analysis of the political infrastructure that supports this debate, and the role played by research within it, provides worthwhile reading for educational and noneducational scholars, in the United States and Canada alike.Yet the book draws its inspiration from a unique event.In August 2004, the New York Times reported a study sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers which claimed that standardized test scores were lower among charter school students than among those in public schools.This finding was newsworthy because charter schools
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".