The War on Public Education: Agonist Democracy and the Fight for Schools as Public Things
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agonistic critiques of democratic theory conceptualize democracy as a site of conflict and struggle; as the fight against privatization escalates, these critiques become more relevant for educational governance. Public education governance has, in addition, increasingly been the site of growing conflicts between federal, states and local levels, as populist and other types of dissent are now emerging in educational politics. These conflicts reached a new nexus with the nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. This nomination represents a vivid battle over public school as a “public thing,” a material object, space, institution or place of symbolic and embodied civic importance (Honig 2017). DeVos’ nomination stirred up, in popular imagination, the idea of public schools as “public things” of meaning and value for many citizens who participated in unprecedented ways to (unsuccessfully) block her appointment. It was with this threat to public education that the value of school as a “public thing” became crystalized among a diverse network of citizens. This political moment reveals 1) the nature of schools as public things, 2) the importance of agonist critiques of democracy, and public work, as a means for citizens to help safe-guard the future of schools as public things. I conclude by explaining the limits of agonism as a comprehensive approach to the democratic governance of schooling, advocating for its use as a critique and expansion of current models of public engagement with educational politics.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 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".