A Habermasian perspective on morally valid decision making in school-district administration: a Newfoundland and Labrador case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research works toward the systematic development of a Habermasian perspective on moral validity within the context of educational administration. Its central aims are to promote Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Morality as a suitable moral epistemology for the field and to provide an initial examination of current attitudes toward adopting district-wide educational initiatives in Newfoundland and Labrador from a moral point of view. Habermas’s clear specification of conditions necessary for the justifiability of morally valid policy- and decision-making offers a promising avenue for empirical research. This facet of his moral epistemology is an ideal point for researchers to grasp the philosophical framework and apply it to real cases. The current study focuses on how senior administrators at one school-board office interpret the four necessary conditions of practical discourse in relation to their work in adopting district-wide initiatives. The method of investigation is semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviewing. The attitudes and perspectives of the district’s Director of Education and three Assistant Directors are explored. These interviews are supplemented with the reflections of a former Director of Education and a former Assistant Director of Human Resources from two additional school districts in Newfoundland and Labrador. Each participant was asked to provide a personal example of the process of adopting educational initiatives and to comment on how they saw each of the four conditions of practical discourse operating within such processes. Key aspects of their responses are presented and implications of their responses for the moral validity of educational initiatives are discussed along with prospects for further research and the education of future administrators.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".