Book Review School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High? Wal-Mart Elementary? " These headlines from Vancouver newspapers during the fall of 2003 are just a sample of reactions to trends all too common across North America. The very best at tracking, mapping and framing the commercialization of schooling is Alex Molnar. And the clearest, most cogent and productive book on the issue is School Commercialism. For over three decades, Molnar has defended public education through activism and research. Upon concluding a brief autobiography written in the mid-1970s, he said: "I still believe schools can be made better places for kids than they are now and that the struggle to make them so is worthwhile " (1975a, p. 166). Similarly, one of his early essays on students rights asserts that civil liberties do not stop at the schoolhouse door (Molnar, 1975b). The sway of corporate authority, censorship and suppression of resistance within schools work in tandem and mean that academic freedom is at stake, a point to which I will return. Molnar's convictions on public schooling and students rights, and his long-term investment in public education underwrite the meticulous research of School Commercialism. But is it still reasonable to expect that schools be relatively free This document is available on the Education Policy Studies Laboratory website at:
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".