Missed opportunities: Managing achievement and difference in an urban public college preparatory magnet high school
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation centers on the responsibility that public schools have for “dealing with the complicated” when they bring students together across lines of difference. Yet it also takes seriously the challenges public schools face with respect to addressing, if not transforming broader American social problems around difference, such as racism, homophobia, the racial achievement gap, and other forms of exclusion, tension, and persecution. Here, then, is the central question that drives this dissertation: Given the divisive dynamics and exclusionary practices that continue to shape relations across forms difference in American society, how can public schools actively take responsibility for engaging with, if not transforming these broader social problems? To address this question, this dissertation looks closely at how one such school, an institution I call Franklin High, manages the challenges and opportunities of bringing students together across lines of difference. As a large, urban, college prepatory magnet high school with a racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse student body that sends ninety-eight percent of its graduates on to higher education, Franklin High provides an ideal case study of a public school and its students managing the social-relational and academic challenges and opportunities of difference. Four years of ethnographic research revealed that, even in an institutional context where students more or less got along and realized academic success, seemingly neutral institutional policies and practices reproduced structural forms of academic exclusion and divisive notions of difference. While Franklin High's public presentation highlighted the value of diversity as a factor that enhances the educational experience for all students, in practice, the school's hands off approach failed to interrupt the reproduction of tensions and prejudices that exist in the broader American society. Furthermore, the limited academic support provided to students from historically underrepresented groups, combined with the meritocratic ideology that permeated the institution, made it difficult for such students to access the top academic track. Moreover, this combination of factors reproduced the racialized achievement discourse that pervades discussions of race, ethnicity, and schooling. Finally, I found that youth spaces played a complex role for students as they managed the challenges and opportunities of difference.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".