What does it mean for social science scholarship to be "ideological"? Part 1: A "bad" paper

A "bad" paper may be "ideological" because its "findings" don't flow from its premises and its empirics. But what even is a "finding" or a conclusion when it comes to social science?

Last week, a group of ten academics released a report, commissioned by the university administrations at Vanderbilt and Washington, about the increasing politicization of research in the social sciences. The report agrees that most fields they surveyed show “some signs of the pathologies” such as “careful scholarship [being] subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal” though they think there is quite a bit of variation between fields.

I should say at the outset that I am predisposed to agree with the report, based on my own experiences in the interpretive social sciences. I read empirical papers all the time where the data are stretched to political conclusions that are not necessarily supported.

But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post. I want to talk more about why this is a difficult problem. The problem is that the closer the topic of any social scientific inquiry to the concerns of everyday people and politicians (why are some people richer? why do some kids get higher grades than others?), the harder it gets to separate “ideology” from “truth” or “empirical rigor.”

That doesn’t mean that the social sciences should just become vehicles of ideology; but it does mean that it is not as easy to say to any piece of well-done social science inquiry that they have allowed their politics to lead them away from what their data is saying. (It is easier to say it to a badly-done piece of social science inquiry and in general, there are always more badly-done empirical pieces than well-done ones.)

The sociologist Jesse Smith gets to some of this in this great post in which he argues that showing that some scholarship is “ideological” requires one to actually be conversant in that scholarship so that one can actually make inferences about what the data is saying versus what the conclusions are. But even this is fraught because this is never going to be a slam-dunk argument.

In this post, I am going to try to show why it is so difficult to do “ideological audits” by taking a piece of “bad” scholarship, one that, in my opinion, is not well-done. In the next post, I’ll pick one that is well-done — and you’ll see that both the “bad” and “good” papers end up at the same place, politically speaking, despite their very different methods and inferences. Then, in the post after that, I’ll try to suggest some solutions.

All right, now on to the “bad” paper.

The “bad” paper

Let me start with the “bad” paper. Again, calling something a “bad” paper only makes sense in terms of what one thinks the normative purpose of scholarship is. I will try to offer that as I analyze this paper.

The paper in question is: Williamson, Ben. 2018. “Silicon Startup Schools: Technocracy, Algorithmic Imaginaries and Venture Philanthropy in Corporate Education Reform.” Critical Studies in Education 59 (2): 218–36. The citation says 2018 because of the journal issue but it was published online in 2016.

The article is based on an analysis of the websites and press material of four different “experimental” schools that are all financed and administered by Silicon Valley people. The four schools being considered are: IBM’s P-tech, AltSchool, Khan Academy, and XQ Super School. These schools promise to educate students using new digital technologies; they are financed by philanthropies funded by Silicon Valley luminaries.

Williamson argues, based on his analysis of the publicity and promotional material of these schools, that they are an embodiment of what he calls an “algorithmic imaginary” that is characterized by a “strict scientific approach, decision-making based on technical knowledge, and skepticism toward political institutions and processes of political democracy” (p. 219). Through the medium of these schools, this imaginary is imported into educational institutions, and the problem of learning is reconfigured in a way that benefits software companies rather than students or teachers.

This is my summary of this work but a skeptical reader should ask what this means exactly. An “imaginary” is just a fancy term for something like “worldview.” So the paper is saying that these schools are characterized by a worldview. But what exactly does it mean that a school is characterized a worldview? How exactly is this worldview expressed in what is happening in these schools? The paper never specifies exactly because we never really see what is happening on the ground in these schools. The paper includes this line:

In this sense, the current algorithmic imaginaries of education being dreamt up in Silicon Valley offices and materialized through the injection of philanthrocapital are becoming the lived reality of education. (p. 223).

But can a discourse analysis of the promotional material really tell us about how “imaginaries” are materialized and the “lived reality” of education? Through the course of the paper, as I read it, I wondered what the warrant for the claims was.

But perhaps, you might say that I am asking the paper to do what it is explicitly not designed to do. The paper is an analysis of promotional materials. Fine. But it’s not even clear exactly what promotional materials were analyzed, how they were chosen or sampled. And one wonders: is there not a danger of interpreting too much from promotional materials? By taking the celebratory language of these promotional materials and raising the alarm about the schools themselves — isn’t this just amplifying hype?

And just to be clear: this is not a fringe paper. Google Scholar tells me that as of writing this (June 2026), it has been cited 254 times since it was published. That’s a big number. We know that most papers are rarely read, let alone cited.

In my estimate, this is both “bad” and “ideological” scholarship. It is bad because it does not follow any systematic methodology in its claims. And I will say that even if it did, there was no way I could see the author changing any of their conclusions.

The reason I classify this paper as more “ideological” is that it is mostly dedicated to perpetuating a worldview. The assumption of the paper is that there is a Silicon Valley worldview (“imaginary” if you will) and that this worldview is bad. This latter part is not explicitly stated but it’s not hidden either. Anyone reading this paper will get that immediately. But this is hidden — not very well — underneath a more “empirical” claim that Silicon Valley does have this worldview, that this worldview is changing the “lived reality” of schools, and that the author can tease this out by looking at the promotional material of these Silicon Valley schools.

The “lived reality” of AltSchool

Is it indeed true that this “imaginary” is injected into the “lived reality of education”? The only way to find this out is by looking at what happens inside these schools (and not just by looking at their promotional material).

As it happens, the writer Rebecca Mead wrote a long profile of AltSchool, one of the four schools that is the focus of Williamson’s article. The article is well-worth reading in full. Mead is a skeptical reporter; she listens to what she is told and tries to bring out the voice of the school’s administrators and teachers; but she also brings her own voice to the table, trying to read between the lines of what she is being told and what she is seeing.

Mead starts out by telling us what is going on in the school:

Students at AltSchool are issued a tablet in pre-K and switch to a laptop in later years. (For now, AltSchool ends at the equivalent of eighth grade.) When I visited a mixed classroom for econd and third graders, most of the children were sunk into their laptops. All were engaged in bespoke activities that had been assigned to them through a “playlist”—software that displays a series of digital “cards” containing instructions for a task to be completed. Sometimes it was an online task. Two children were doing keyboarding drills on a typing Web site. Their results would be uploaded for a teacher’s assessment and added to the student’s online Learning Progression—software developed by AltSchool which captures, in minute detail, a student’s progress.

She tells us where the school’s founder was coming from:

When Ventilla [AltSchool’s 35-year old founder] quit Google to start AltSchool, in the spring of 2013, he had no experience as a teacher or an educational administrator. But he did have extensive knowledge of networks, and he understood the kinds of insights that can be gleaned from big data.

She tells us something about the motivations of AltSchool’s founder and its backers:

Today, [the school] employs more than a hundred and fifty people, split evenly among educators, technologists, and operations managers. This rapid growth has been funded by a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital—and twenty million in venture debt—that has been raised over the past two years, among the largest investments ever made in education technology.

“None of these backers,” she tells us:

… want merely to own part of a chain of boutique micro-schools. Rather, they hope that AltSchool will help “reinvent” American education: first, by innovating in its micro-schools; next, by providing software to educators who want to start up their own schools; and, finally, by offering its software for use in public schools across the nation, a goal that the company hopes to achieve in three to five years.

So far so good: investors, presumably those with some relationship to Silicon Valley, who are interested in this vision are interested in reinventing schooling.

But Mead points out that “[the] gap between AltSchool’s ambitions for technology and the reality of the classroom was painfully obvious the morning that I spent in the Brooklyn school.”

This is already clear if one has been reading her piece carefully. We see that teachers do get to see, through dashboards, reports on what the students are doing. On the other hand, teachers want more and are not entirely happy with certain processes.

Students too seem to be experiencing a variety of outcomes. Some kids like it. But:

One kindergartner grew increasingly frustrated with his tablet as he tried to take a photograph of interlocking cubes that he had snapped into a strip of ten. (He was supposed to upload the image to his playlist.) He shook the unresponsive tablet, then stabbed repeatedly at the screen, like an exhausted passenger in a cab after an overnight flight, unable to quell the Taxi TV.

Even when AltSchool’s methods worked as intended, there were sometimes questionable results. The two girls whom I watched searching for seals on Google Images found plenty of suitable photographs. But the same search term called up a news photo of the corpse of a porpoise, its blood blossoming in the water after being rent almost in half by a seal attack. It also called up an image in which the head of Seal, the singer, had been Photoshopped onto a sea lion’s body—an object of much fascination to the students. To the extent that this exercise was preparing them for the workplace of the future, it was also dispiritingly familiar from the workplace of the present, where the rabbit holes of the Internet offer perpetual temptation.

Mead sees some children “involved in complicated long-term projects” and concludes that the choice they were given to “follow their own passions” “reaped rich dividends.” On the other hand, many others “had made less demanding use of their choice time.” Some had chosen “tablet time” and

were sitting around a table, each with headphones on, expertly swiping and clicking their way through word or number games. Their quiet immersion would be recognizable to any parent who has ever bought herself a moment’s peace from the demands of interacting with her child by opening Angry Birds on her phone.

In other words, the glass was perhaps a little bit full but a lot of it empty.

None of this reporting should surprise ANYONE who is acquainted with the history of American educational technology and educational reform movements.

David Tyack and Larry Cuban, distinguished historians, write that this is THE story of educational technologies and educational reform in the US over the past century. There is the rhetoric of educational reformers who make outsized promises about what the technology can do. And there is what is happening on the ground where change is difficult to accomplish, because of the practical difficulty of getting the technologies to work.

Changes in schooling are difficult to accomplish. The history shows that new technologies that get taken up in schools are often the ones that most mimic the conventional “grammar of schooling”; this is because the use of technologies is contingent on how they fit into the established practices and constraints of parents, students, and teachers.¹

For example, the instructional “teaching machines” invented by behaviorist psychologists in the mid-20th century were never even mass-produced (let alone used in schools) despite copious hype because manufacturers believed that the machines would sell only if schools could afford them, if they could work across a variety of situations found in schools and if they fitted into the established practices of teachers and students—none of which were true at that time.²

On the other hand, the “cognitive tutors” built by CMU researchers in the 1980s gained substantial adoption but because they were made to fit into the grammar of schooling rather than transform it.³

The lived reality of AltSchool, then, is not an example of this algorithmic imaginary in action.

While the Williamson piece was written before the New Yorker profile of AltSchool appeared, let me take a similar scholarly piece that makes a similar point as Williamson (and cites his piece) but also cites the New Yorker profile. Needless to say, the New Yorker profile gets interpreted very differently from how I have interpreted it above.

Consider the book “The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World” by media scholars José van Dijck, Martijn de Waal, and Thomas Poell (cited 7641 times since it was published, according to Google Scholar). The book’s broader topic is about the values that internet platforms embody, which is to say it is about the worldview or imaginary of platforms.

I won’t speak about the book as a whole (perhaps another post another time) but it includes a chapter on “Education” and one of the sections of this chapter is on AltSchool titled “AltSchool and the Transformation of K-12 Education” (p. 123-126).

This section cites both the Williamson piece and the Mead New Yorker piece.

Here is its conclusion about AltSchool:

In terms of educational philosophy, AltSchool favors technology over teachers, online task-oriented learning takes over classroom instruction, and predictive analytics replace teachers’ professional judgments. (p. 124).

Does it though? Is that what you thought after reading Mead’s New Yorker piece?

This sentence I pasted above links to a footnote. One expects that the footnote will prove this is the case. But the footnote actually says the following:

Pedagogical principles and teaching expertise are readily traded for managerial systems and information technology (IT) experts. As Hartong (2016, 530–31) observes: “In the perfect world of digital-era governance, state-organized educational institutions (such as schools) become gradually substituted with intelligent education networks, which operate as interactive online learning cultures, while schools and teachers are expected to secure IT-handling skills.”

In other words, the footnote makes yet another claim that AltSchool prioritizes “Managerial systems and IT experts” over “pedagogical principles and teaching expertise” and cites yet another article which makes some claim about the worldview of internet platforms.

When this section cites the New Yorker piece, it does so in this way:

In her ethnographic observation of AltSchool’s daily practice in the New Yorker, Mead (2016) concludes that data analytics change the role of an educator to “someone who is more of a data-enabled detective” (9).

Here is what this ostensible quote from Mead actually says and let me reproduce the full paragraph here:

Ventilla [the founder of AltSchool] told me that these tools [the analytics on student interactions with software available to the teachers] were central to a revised conception of what a teacher might be: “We are really shifting the role of an educator to someone who is more of a data-enabled detective.” He defined a traditional teacher as an “artisanal lesson planner on one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand.” Educators are stakeholders in AltSchool’s eventual success: equity has been offered to all full-time teachers. [my emphasis]

In other words, the conclusion that van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell attribute to the author Mead is actually a quote from the founder of AltSchool explaining his philosophy to Mead. This is a big point. This is not a conclusion that Mead draws from her “ethnographic observation”; it is a statement of the school’s philosophy as stated by its founder (and that, as Mead observes later, “[the] gap between AltSchool’s ambitions for technology and the reality of the classroom was painfully obvious”).

What is scholarship?

The problem is that the criticism I made of the Williamson article (and a small section of another book) can easily be rebutted by the authors.

To my claim that the authors of the pieces I discussed above are not making claims substantiated by evidence, that their analysis of the "imaginary” of the schools doesn’t speak much about their “lived reality,” the authors might respond that they are not trying to say anything about what is happening in schools, lines about “lived reality” notwithstanding. They are instead trying to tell us about the “worldview” (i.e., imaginary) of the Silicon Valley types who start these alternative tech-heavy schools.

They have a point. I might say that the authors claim about Silicon Valley’s supposedly harmful “worldview” only gains resonance because they can appeal to “lived reality” but they might argue that the worldview stands on its own irrespective of the lived reality. And what is “worldview” anyway? How does one go about distilling a worldview from the promotional material put out by alternative schools and their funders?

And the authors could rebut me by saying that my point about their writing (at least about AltSchool) being “ideological” because their claims are not commensurate with evidence (that at least in one case they even cite!) is an example of my own ideology which is perhaps more sympathetic to the “worldview” the authors have excavated.

If my answer to that is that no, while I may be more sympathetic to the said worldview, my point is just about the gap between evidence and conclusions, would you be convinced?

I’m curious about what others think.

In the next post, I will look at some empirical scholarship on the same phenomenon — the alternative tech-heavy school — that I consider “good” meaning that there is a good match between evidence and conclusions. But even here, this good scholarship also ends up in the same place politically speaking. But that’s in the next post.

1. See Larry' Cuban’s book Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, pp. 51-71.

2. See Audrey Watters’ book Teaching Machines, pp. 195-212.

3. I’ll cite myself here. Kelkar, Shreeharsh. "Between AI and learning science: the evolution and commercialization of intelligent tutoring systems." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 44.1 (2022): 20-30.