The Politics of "Access": Undocumented Students and Enrollment in Toronto Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bordering occurs beyond ports of entry. It operates in spaces where immigration status is examined in order to participate or access a public good. In Ontario, schools serve as borders and often exclude undocumented migrant on the basis of status. At the same time, community activists work to erode border-zones and redefine "membership." This project tracks and analyzes one such initiative. It historicizes constructions of membership in relation to the Toronto District School Board and its "Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy." This policy, discursively known as a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy stipulates that the Board would protect students by barring employees from asking, reporting, or sharing information regarding a family's immigration-status. However, the policy remains to be fully implemented, the Board has constructed procedures that make enrolment more difficult, and undocumented students continue to experience exclusion. . Thus, this project addresses the gaps in implementation as well as differing understandings of what constitutes "access."The project combines Anti-racist theory, LatCrit, border rhetoricity, and concepts developed by Frantz Fanon, and Antonio Gramsci. This framework facilitates the examination of the construction of internal borders along hegemonic understandings of membership, how these processes are facilitated by the dehumanization of undocumented migrants, and the resistance practices of migrants and their allies. Data stems from interviews, experiential knowledge, and grey literature. Interviews were conducted with fourteen differently located social actors including TDSB administrators and grassroots organizers. Grey literature from the TDSB, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Coalition, and No One Is Illegal- Toronto was also examinedKey findings include the ways bureaucratic processes at the TDSB invisibilize undocumented migrants and the resultant hegemonic reproduction of bordering in spite of "access" policies. Additionally, this project highlights the strategies employed by community organizers to make Toronto a space of "non-compliance" to immigration authorities and how access to schooling is framed as a key component. Finally, different framings of "access" are examined. While Board practices equated access to the ability to enroll, local activists demanded broader understandings of this concept including recognition of the ways interrelated factors, including safety and access to other services affected schooling.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".