Schooling in the Age of Austerity: Public Education, Youth, and Social Instability in the Neoliberal City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the dynamics of “security” and “insecurity” in U.S. public schooling within the context of neoliberal urbanism and austerity. It argues that the entrenched problems confronting urban public schools today can be attributed largely to systemic failure—a toxic mixture of global economic change and volatility, profiteering and corruption, stunted imagination, and misguided policies, values and priorities. This has contributed to deepening material insecurity and inequality in the urban sphere and the erosion of social commitments to public schools and young people, especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. This thesis analyzes these forces through an ethnographic case study in a neighborhood and public high school in Chicago: Ellison Square and Ellison High School (EHS). It asks: What are the pragmatic and imaginative limits of security in urban public schooling in a moment of escalating economic and social dislocation? Through the perspectives of those most affected, namely youth and their teachers, it documents the contradictions and effects of educational privatization, disinvestment, commercialization of curriculum, and the rise of a militarized culture of policing and securitized containment in urban schools and neighborhoods. It argues that these processes represent forms of enclosure that are undermining the democratic and ethical purpose of public schools and thereby making the daily lives and future of young people ever more insecure and precarious. Drawing inspiration from the perspectives of young people and their teachers, the thesis ultimately advocates for an educational vision that locates public schooling not as a commodity valued primarily for its role in shoring-up technical economic and military demands, but as a commons—a site critical to developing human security, economic justice and democratic life.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".