Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project explores how ‘sex ed’ exemptions are being enacted in Ontario classrooms. In August 2019, the Ministry of Education issued Policy/Program Memorandum 162, requiring Ontario school boards to have a policy or procedure allowing Grade 1-8 students to be exempted from Human Development and Sexual Health curriculum expectations at their parents' request. However, rather than limiting exemptions to formal lessons in the HDSH expectations of elementary Health and Physical Education, many teachers believe that they must exempt students from any conversation, formal or not, involving 2SLGBTQ+ topics. This has the potential to further stigmatize queer identities, as well as related topics and discussions. This research is also connected the conversation of how much sway “parental rights” have in the classroom. The first stage of this project has involved collecting exemption policy documents and board exemption forms, along with tracking how findable these documents are. As of today, 56 boards appear to have responded to PPM 162, either by passing a new policy or revising an existing one. Only 41% of school boards have a description of their exemption process available through Google search, while 30% of boards do not have their process available online at all. Unfortunately, problematic organizations like Parents as First Educators and Canadian Gender Report—both of which publish ‘resources’ claiming that parents have the right to exempt their children from all content about gender and sexual diversity—have materials which appear easily on Google search, sometimes even before authorized school board pages. If school boards do not have official exemption processes and forms readily available online, it is possible that parents will turn to these problematic documents instead. These gaps in the online availability of official board information may contribute to the dangerous misunderstandings present in how ‘sex ed’ exemptions are handled in Ontario schools.
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 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) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".