The Question of the Student In Educational Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In pursuing the goals of educational reform over the past several decades, educational policy makers have focused on teachers, administrators, and school structures as keys to higher educational achievement. As the would-be beneficiaries of reform, students, and their interaction with the educational system, have been almost entirely overlooked in the pursuit of educational excellence. Yet, as we argue, students are as causally central as educators in bringing about higher educational achievement. In what follows, we examine rational student interaction with the educational system and show why a large number of students have incentives to undercut the intent of the reforms. These are incentives created by our development of an educationally-based, meritocratic social and economic system. No one, apparently, is asking what exactly is in the reforms from the point of view of quite rational, if sometimes irresponsible, student self-interest. Indeed, the eduationally-based, meritocratic social and economic system may be actually forming student preferences guaranteed to result in educational mediocrity rather than excellence. Finally, we comment upon the meaning of "educational excellence" and show why the educational reformers' understanding of the purpose of public education—to compete in the global economic system—can only fail to capture it. In doing so, we point to the kinds of educational structures and policies that create multiple pathways to competent adulthood that do have a chance of bringing about the reformers' stated goal of excellence in the educational system. But these are structures and policies that challenge the entire conceptual framework of the current educational reform movement.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".