The Politics of Educational Reform: The Alberta Charter School Experiment 20 Years Later.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we examine the public charter school movement in the Province of Alberta, Canada over the past 20 years to determine how charter school policy and regulations have limited and controlled the impact of charter schools on public education.Specifically we focus on the extent to which charter schools in Alberta fulfilled the aims and expectations of policy reformers as sites of research and innovation, vehicles to create competition, and expanded public school choice options for parents, and to enhance student learning and outcomes.Based on a critical policy analysis and interviews with stakeholder groups we argue that charter schools in Alberta have been a controlled experiment in the introduction of quasimarkets in the public education system.The Ministry of Education created a regulatory structure permitting a limited number of charter schools to exist at any point in time, and a rigorous approval process that created sufficient pressure to leverage change in public education and expanded choice options for parents; however, the tight regulations have also prevented charter schools from fulfilling their full mandate as a vehicle of educational reform.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".