A Focusing Tragedy: Public Policy and the Establishment of Afrocentric Education in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. In January 2008, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) voted to establish Afrocentric education. Earlier proposals dating back to the early 1990s, however, garnered little response from the board. Why was the TDSB suddenly more amenable to the idea? We argue that the death of Jordan Manners acted as a focusing event that triggered concern regarding school safety and the challenges facing Black youth in Toronto, altering the policy climate and opening a window of opportunity for change. This analysis furthers conceptualizations of the connections between focusing events, policy entrepreneurs, the viability of alternative proposals, and the catalysts that facilitate policy change. Résumé. En janvier 2008, le Conseil Scolaire du District de Toronto (CSDT) a voté en faveur de l'établissement d'un programme d'éducation afro-centrée. Des propositions précédentes remontant au début des années 1990 avaient suscité peu d'intérêt de la part du Conseil. Pourquoi le CSDT s'est-il soudainement montré réceptif à cette idée? Nous considérons que le décès de Jordan Manners a servi d'épisode marquant qui a suscité de fortes préoccupations quant à la sécurité à l'école et aux défis auxquels font face les jeunes noirs à Toronto. Cet évènement marquant a contribué à modifier le climat politique et à ouvrir une fenêtre d'opportunité propice au changement. Cette analyse conceptualise de plus les liens entre épisodes marquants, entrepreneurs politiques, la viabilité de différentes propositions et les catalyseurs qui facilitent le changement politique.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".