The Paradox of Equity in Ontario's Public Education System: The Making of an Epistemology of Ignorance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation research examines equity work in the Ontario public education system from 2009 to 2020. This work forwards the category of “equity leader” to draw attention to educators who are tasked with teaching entire school boards about equity and inclusion work. The dissertation demonstrates how school boards in Ontario profess through equity discourse, polices, and publications that they support notions of equity and inclusion, yet the barriers to equity work continue to be reproduced. Equity leaders’ experiences provide a rich platform for highlighting the paradoxical nature of equity work and systemic racism in education, and how organizations are complicit in systemic racism even while they profess to believe in equity principles. In Ontario, equity leader roles span the associate director, superintendent, principal, teacher, and consultant positions. Their daily duties include supporting equity and inclusion work from junior kindergarten to Grade 12 as well as supporting business staff and working with school communities. Through interviews with twenty-one equity leaders from the Toronto District School Board, Peel District School Board, and York Region District School Board, as well as document analysis, the study demonstrates how equity leaders do equity work in education systems that are racist and colonial. Equity leaders’ knowledge and skills demonstrate how people navigate, resist, and contend with systemic racism, and exert agency within institutions that are racist. Using Charles Mills’ racial contract conceptual framework, which posits that white supremacy is predicated upon an epistemology of ignorance and a commitment to a racial fantasyland, the multifaceted paradox of equity work is explored.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".