How free are classroom teachers? Understanding teacher academic freedom in the United States and Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents the results of an international survey of teachers’ perspectives on academic freedom. We surveyed 173 social studies and science teachers from the United States and Canada about the importance of academic freedom, their comfort level broaching controversial topics in four broad areas (politics, economics, health and safety, and science), and the factors that influence their decision-making around discussing controversial topics. The study found that teachers value academic freedom despite being aware of how limited their freedom is in practice. Particularly controversial topics included safe injection sites, abortion, prisons, medically assisted dying, and same-sex marriage. Analysis via Mann-Whitney U tests was conducted to analyse whether teachers’ individual differences (e.g., experience, gender, or job status) influenced their pedagogical approach. Gender and years of experience had little influence, but teachers’ cautiousness was significantly influenced by whether they have tenure and the political climate of the area where they work.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it