LOOSELY CULTIVATING DISCIPLINE: FROM ZERO TOLERANCE TO PROGRESSIVE DISCIPLINE IN AN ONTARIO SCHOOL BOARD
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores connections between school discipline policies and educational inequality by examining the implementation of “Progressive Discipline” (PD) in an Ontario school board. By using positive reinforcements, preventions, and early and ongoing interventions, PD has replaced more punitive “zero tolerance” approaches as the official approach to student discipline in provincial public schools. This study poses two broad research questions that are guided by prominent theories of school organization and family-school relations: i) Given prevailing schooling practices, how is PD actually implemented, ii) can PD compensate for student inequalities in exposure to cultural orientations demanded by schools. To address these questions, this study draws on 36 qualitative interviews with key actors in several schools, and has two key findings. First, despite the official shift from zero tolerance to PD, student discipline continues to be managed by schools and individual school-based actors along a continuum, with some becoming more progressive, while others remaining more punitive. Thus, this policy evolution has involved a shift from a tighter to a more “loosely coupled” form of organization. But despite this variation, school-based actors are gradually embracing PD, since more progressive perspectives on student discipline appear to resonate with many educators and administrators. Second, the shift to PD is creating new forms of cultural practices in schools, and these practices are generating considerable variations in the outcomes of discipline processes. Building on these findings, this study concludes that progressive discipline policy has the potential to serve as a mechanism of “cultural mobility” and partially compensate for students’ unequal exposure to the values, behaviours and skill sets that are needed to comply with schools’ standards of behaviour.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".