The erosion of the political in neoliberal education as manifested in school principal practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This empirical study explores school principals’ perspectives and actions concerning the intricate relationship between education, social gaps, and inequality. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 14 diverse principals, we reveal how neoliberal thinking, characterized by the erosion of the political, permeates their educational philosophy and practice. This undermines education’s potential to foster social justice. Our findings indicate that principals’ political reduction in education is evident in their abstract perception of students, detached from their socioeconomic and cultural contexts, and in their individualistic view of the school’s role. This reduction is actively enabled by specific strategies of psychologization and trivialization, which effectively marginalize the vital social aspect of education and normalize existing practices that lead to the marginalization of disadvantaged populations within the educational system. The diminished role of society as an organizing principle in educational thought prevents schools from being perceived as sites for democratization and social reform. To counteract neoliberal logic, we recommend integrating a theoretical learning module into educational leadership training. This module should focus on the historical and philosophical development of democracy and its evolving foundational concepts.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".