So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools, by Charles Payne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Charles Payne states in his introduction, this book is about failure, frustration, and struggle: After nearly half a century of educational reforms any promised change has not come through.What happened?Was it lack of implementation?Weak policies?Inadequate leadership?Is anyone to be blamed?Lots of questions could be posed in order to understand the breakdown of the latest reforms in education.First it is necessary to be aware of the difference between reform and change.Not all change in education is produced by reform and not all reforms bring about change.In other words, reform as a deliberated intervention in education through policy may or may not generate change.The occurrence of educational change could be driven by different factors that are not necessarily related to policy.Payne aims to explore factors involved in what he calls the sociology of failure, focusing mainly on the phenomenon of demoralization, which in his view, is the most common symptom of dysfunctionality in schools.Examples include (a) the lack of trust, (b) the lack of collegiality, (c) the disenchantment, and (d) the disillusion that dwell in the most troubled schools where no reform attempt has succeeded in years.Although parts of the study use the city of Chicago as background, the stories and experiences can be easily extrapolated to other contexts.Certainly, this is not a locally focused book: The challenges of reform, implementation, and change that Chicago schools face, are faced by school districts throughout Canada as they become more diverse and multicultural.Payne states two methodological points at the beginning:
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".