School Success for Roma Children: Step by Step Special Schools Initiative Interim Report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roma children experience little success in schools in Central and Eastern Europe. While much research has examined the socioeconomic conditions that contribute to their academic failure, very few models of successful education have been created. The Step by Step Roma Special Schools Initiative developed and tested a model that focuses on creating conditions that foster educational success for Roma children. This pilot project, supported by the Open Society Institute in New York, has been in existence since the Fall of 1999 in special schools in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, and in special schools and remedial classes in mainstream schools in Hungary. The project operates under the auspices of the national Step by Step NGO's that are all members of ISSA, the International Step by Step Association. An international coordinating team works with national teams to support and monitor project implementation. The project is based on the conviction that Roma children are mislabeled "mentally handicapped" and misplaced in special education. Our hypothesis was that, given appropriate conditions for learning, the majority of Roma children are capable of academic achievement to the level of mainstream curriculum standards. Proactive Information Services Inc., an educational evaluation company whose clients include ministries of education throughout Canada, was contracted to provide an independent test of the project's hypothesis and to lead a team of national researchers. Distinguished researchers from each country collected and analyzed additional data required by their national ministries of education.
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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".