The politics of distraction in planning English-medium education policy in schools
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents the findings of a critical ethnography focused on the English-medium instruction (EMI) policy in Nepal’s public schools. Through the analysis of policy documents and interviews with policymakers, the study reveals that policymakers view the EMI policy as a solution to the crisis in public schools by enhancing their competitiveness with private English-medium schools. However, this approach is identified as a ‘politics of distraction’, as it diverts attention from broader issues such as implicit privatization, funding cuts, and accountability deficits for implementing multilingual education policy. By framing EMI as a public policy doctrine using discursive strategies (e.g. neoliberal rationalization and justification) and suggesting that the crisis can be resolved through school privatization, which in turn promotes commodified languages like English and the national dominant language, Nepali, over local/Indigenous languages, policymakers largely disregard inequalities, structural conditions, and reinforce the existing unequal power relations. By diverting attention from critical issues, policymakers perpetuate historical marginalization, colonial agendas and ideologies, and unequal power asymmetries, failing to address systemic challenges. The research underscores the necessity of scrutinizing the motivations and agendas underlying the promotion of EMI in mainstream schools in multilingual contexts.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it