The possibilities and limitations of change from within: How alternative schools for marginalized youth in Toronto, Ontario fare in the state education system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada's public schools reflect the nation-state's settler colonial, neoliberal climate by reproducing and contributing to the systemic and structural inequities endured by colonized subjects.This qualitative, multiple case study examines the experiences of students and teachers at four alternative schools for marginalized students in Toronto, Ontario-particularly students who are poor and working class, racialized, identify as LGBTQ+, and/or live with disabilities or mental health issues-by investigating why these students leave mainstream schools, and in turn, whether alternative schools are serving these students' needs via their relational dynamics, pedagogy, and curricula.Employing Grounded Theory, and based on interviews and focus groups with 19 students, 10 teachers, and one administrator, I argue that alternative schools are confined by institutional standards and provincial expectations that permeate state schools, and subsequently, are not devoid of neoliberal ideologies that blame, deviate, and pathologize marginalized students.Alternative schools nevertheless serve marginalized students as safe and caring communities that reject state schooling norms, resist bureaucratic schooling structures, provide extensive mental health assistance, and deliver some reformative pedagogy and curricula that tackle issues of oppression, notwithstanding the reality that alternative schools typically only mend symptoms of marginalization, rather than effectively transgress settler colonial and neoliberal power relations.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".