A National Census of Sustainability in K-12 Education Policy: Implications for International Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on the first nationwide census examining sustainability uptake in policy initiatives in Canadian K-12 education. Included in the study are each of Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial ministries of education, and all 374 public school divisions across the country. Sustainability was defined as including, at minimum, consideration of environmental issues, with the study also encompassing use of other related terminologies. Data were collected on three types of policy initiatives: (a) the existence of sustainability-specific policy, (b) participation in sustainability certification programs, and (c) the existence of sustainability staff, which were examined in relation to a range of geographic and institutional variables. Sustainability-specific policy was examined across five domains of a whole institution approach to sustainability: governance, curriculum, facilities and operations, research, and community outreach. We found that 54% of ministries of education and 59% of school divisions in Canada had sustainability-specific policy, most commonly in the curriculum domain at the ministry level and in the operations domain at the school division level. In addition, 43% of school divisions had participated in a sustainability certification program, and 25% had sustainability staff. We discuss implications for policy making in Canada as well for intergovernmental UN policy programs, in particular regarding new policy development and monitoring and evaluation efforts.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.039 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".