Perspectives and practices on commercialism in education: a study of school administrators in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public education in Canada is currently undergoing a period of financial restraint and fiscal reform. In spite of these restraints, schools are still mandated to provide diverse educational services, such as academic support and extensive extra- and co-curricular activities. This is placing school administration in the challenging position of funding these programs while balancing school budgets. This qualitative study, conducted with the grounded theory methodology, examined the commercial practices and perspectives of Montreal school administrators. Although there is an abundance of theoretical literature on commercialism in education, very few studies have examined these practices from the perspective of the administrators themselves. The study focuses on the importance of ethical educational leadership in light of seven commercial practices: fundraising, sponsorship of school programs, exclusive agreements, sponsorship of incentive programs, appropriation of space, sponsorship of supplementary educational materials, and digital marketing. The findings suggest that current fiscal landscapes combined with budgetary restrictions and increased educational needs and expectations, pressures school administrators to actively seek out additional funding through commercial practices. When school administrators are faced with these restrictions and expectations they initiate a process of deliberation which takes into account complex ethical considerations. Administrators tend to rely on their personal values and past-experiences to establish good-judgement in their decision making process.
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 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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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 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".