"They gon' study some [things]": representation of schools and schooling in HBO's «The Wire»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative inquiry is a close reading of the representations of public schools and schooling in HBO's television drama The Wire. I pay particular attention to the experiences of school administrators, educators, and students. The Wire draws from the ethnographic work of David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun journalist, and Edward Burns, a retired homicide detective and public school teacher. In examining the show's critiques of public schooling, I ask these questions: What types of representations of public schools and schooling are revealed in season four of The Wire? What kind of knowledge do these representations produce, and how is this knowledge socially and culturally relevant to teachers and to teacher education programs? I conceive of The Wire as a heteroglossic text that challenges dominant conceptions of schools and the education enterprise. Linguist Mikhail Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as the presence of different languages within a body of work, where each language presents and represents distinct worldviews. I use French philosopher Julia Kristeva's view of texts as productive entities that disrupt unexamined assumptions and generate new forms of seeing, being, and doing. Through my interpretive understandings, I suggest that schools are resistant to organizational change but that institutions of formal education may offer the potential to forge interpersonal relationships through which meaningful learning can occur. I also propose a revaluation of managerial approaches to education that rely on statistics to quantify learning. In closing, I recommend further research into the social functions of schooling, and the similarities that exist between schools and other normative institutions like law enforcement, mental health, and prisons.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".