Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes a study that examined the volume of secondary course failure and its direct budget impact on Ontario’s K–12 public education system. The study employed a straightforward, descriptive accounting method to estimate the annual expenditure tied to secondary course failure, taking into account some factors known to be systemically related (e.g., grade level, subject area, additional services received). Other studies have used secondary dropouts as the measure of failure and estimated the private or public costs; this study focused on the direct budget impact of secondary course failures on districts and the school system. In the 2008–2009 year, there were approximately 5,082,543 secondary course attempts across 70 school boards in Ontario: 4,682,535 were completed successfully (passed) and 400,008 were unsuccessfully completed (failed). I estimated the total level of expenditure tied to failure for Ontario’s public education system to be $472,729,698, or 7.7% of total instructional and operational spending. My findings point to practical applications that could help district and system leaders in their work to drive positive educational outcomes. I also provide a methodological framework for thinking about levels of expenditure tied to secondary course failure at the system and school board levels. Currently no such framework exists in the public realm.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".