Making a Difference in Urban Schools: Ideas, Politics, and Pedagogy (2012) Jane Gaskell & Ben Levin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a critical and well-written undertaking that adds significantly to the historical understanding of educational policy evolution, Gaskell and Levin trace the major educational changes that the Toronto, Ontario, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, city school districts undertook over the past 50 years.The book is a critical addition to students of educational policy, as well as educational history, who are examining the role of urban school reform efforts in two of Canada's largest cities.The authors divide their work into seven chapters, each focusing on a specific subtext of the reform plans launched within the case studies.The final section of the book provides students with a methodology that will assist future researchers in replicating the study in other cities experiencing reform movements.In the introduction, the authors acknowledge the demographic changes that urban areas were undergoing and "efforts to address poverty in the late 1960s and early 1970s were only one part of a broader effort to change schools and school systems" (p.5).The authors ground their work in research studies that highlight poverty and ethnic diversity, which specifically includes the "increasing number of visible minorities, linguistic groups, and Aboriginal people in cities" (p.17).By doing so, the work contributes for students of educational policy a specific understanding of the needs of groups traditionally marginalized in urban education.The final section of the first chapter reviews the work available on urban education.Gaskell and Levin provide a rich description of the major research studies available, using an international perspective that includes studies from the United Kingdom and the United States.This chapter would provide a good starting point for a graduate seminar in urban educational reform.My only criticism of the literature review is in their omission of Jonathan Kozol's work on poverty and race in educational settings.For readers in the Unites States, Kozol's (2006) The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is a standard reading assignment for many educators seeking to study urban educational systems.This inclusion would have provided contextual background for readers who may not be familiar with Kozol's writings.Gaskell and Levin then turn their attention specifically to the two school settings under study, Winnipeg and Toronto.The second and third chapters of the book provide a constructive counter balance as the history of the two urban education systems is detailed.The authors, using a series of semi-structured interviews with key figures in the two systems, richly weave illustrative quotations into a narrative of tensions faced by the two boards of education as the
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".