Understanding School Choice in Canada (2016), by Lynn Bosetti and Dianne Gereluk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a well-written introduction to the policy debates on school choice, Lynn Bosetti and Dianne Gereluk move readers away from the "strong emotional responses" (p. 3) that many scholars, educators, policymakers, and parents have on this subject.By examining the philosophical roots of school choice debates in Canada, the authors provide a well argued, reasoned, and highly readable text on what is normally a divisive subject.The authors start their discussion of school choice through examination of an important assumption in many of the debates underway currently on school choice."Normative assumptions regarding the aims and purpose of schooling are not always acknowledged by detractors or advocates of school choice theory" (p.5), and the introduction argues that many reports and studies fail to "attend to unique contexts in which particular policies originate" (p. 7).These two foundational points help explain the uniqueness and significance of the book: rooting school choice discussion in the original purpose of public education and how each local educational agency is allowed to enact this duty to prepare students for a future engagement with the world at large.What was fascinating to me as an American is the number of school choice opportunities available in many Canadian provinces.School districts have latitude in providing school choice to citizens, a situation that is not present in the United States.The Canadian Constitution protects which rights "Francophone, Anglophone and Aboriginal people" (p.8) possess concerning schooling, in contrast with the absence of educational rights in the U.S. Constitution.In Canada, the success of the school system, as measured on international tests, is beyond repute.In the United States, as Bosetti and Gereluk observe, many supporters of school choice are trying to remove children from a "failing school" and provide placement in a better educational opportunity.The authors want their book to "move beyond the polemic debates about whether school choice is good or bad and towards how it can be conceived and implemented to complement and enhance public education in a democracy" (p.8).This objective is significant in its goal of improving public discourse on school choice in the western hemisphere.The introduction concludes with a two page set of definitions of various terminology associated with school choice.The authors' decision to include these definitions strengthens the book by providing a set of definitions that students and scholars may utilize in the school choice discussions.A set of standardized definitions is a critical factor in any policy debate, and the location of these terms in the book is a convenient reference for scholars.International readers are likely to appreciate this glossary as they create comparisons between their home educational systems and Canadian ones.The definitions of school choice terminology are especially relevant
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".