Accountability synopticism: How a think tank and the media developed a quasimarket for school choice in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school ‘report card’ that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme that highlighted and concealed visibility asymmetries between schools. Against the backdrop of a shifting political landscape, report cards helped focus the public’s attention on school achievement scores that identified low-, mid-, and high-performing schools. A quasi-market for education emerged in the non-place of language and discourse when school ranking results became the basis by which parents made decisions about where to send their children to school. When student achievement data is used to identify British Columbia’s ‘best’ and ‘worst’ performing secondary schools in this way, standardized assessment practices may be considered high-stakes.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".