A Flyvbjergian Perspective on Public Elementary School Closures in Toronto: A Question of ‘Rationality’ or ‘Power’?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion of social capital in contemporary societies is viewed as being necessary for the rejuvenation of civil society. However, such assumptions are based on inclusionary democratic practices; the heterogeneity of societal needs and the underlying power structures are often not taken into account. The author explores the possibility of examining neighbourhood-based social capital along the lines of ‘intrinsic’ (within neighbourhood) and ‘extrinsic’ (neighbourhood–city) relations. A spatial comparison of such preexisting, dense, dynamic networks of everyday mundane activities often leads to a better understanding of how power is created, maintained, and eventually used in times of neighbourhood crises. More specifically, by using a Flyvbjergian perspective of rationality and power, the author combines the notion of social capital as proposed by Putnam with Epstein's framework of participation within schools, to identify variations in civic activities within Public Elementary School Districts in Toronto (TDSB). Drawing from a unique descriptive dataset on parental and community participation available from the TDSB, and by combining it with enumeration-area data aggregated at the school-district level, this framework is empirically tested to gain an understanding of how such links relate to school-closure decisions. Within the context of education reform in Ontario, the results reveal the paradoxical nature of social capital in promoting and subjugating notions of democracy and civil society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".