Globalization and the selective permeability of public policy-making: The case of K--12 education in Ontario, 1990--2003
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation applies Hall's (1993) model of a policy paradigm to the case of education reform in Ontario for the purposes of exploring the validity of the "globalization thesis," the claim that the dominance of business interests in domestic politics has made the welfare state unsustainable. From 1990 to 2003, successive governments led by the social democratic New Democratic Party and the "New Right" (neoliberal and neoconservative) Progressive Conservative Party launched the most comprehensive reorganization of primary and secondary ("K-12") education since the 1960s. By the end of this period, it was commonly held that the welfare state model of the post-war era (1945-1990) had been replaced by the New Right model of "Outcomes-Based Education" (OBE). The rise of OBE was seen as proof of the demise of both: (1) partisan agency (the ability of governments to make policy not contradictory to their core beliefs about the role of government); and (2) electoral politics (the public's capacity to block unpopular reforms via the ballot).A review of the evidence disproves these two popular conclusions. First, Hall's conditions for policy change---a simultaneous shift in the three "orders" of policy ("goals," "programs," and "detailed settings")---were not met; rather, change occurred only at the programmatic and settings levels. While major policy adjustments were made during the thirteen year period, the welfare state goals of decommodification, destratification, and social solidarity were not appreciably diminished. Second, the left-of-centre preferences of the New Democrats were no more constrained than usual in the liberal market context of Ontario; and, contrary to globalizationist predictions, the Tories did not have "carte blanche" to remake education in the image of the New Right. Ultimately, in complex areas of social policy, proof of paradigmatic change and/or democratic nullification does not lie in surface-level evidence of programmatic adjustments. Instead, it is necessary to inquire into: (1) the ideas about government apparent in policy statements, the policy-making process, and final decisions; and, (2) the intentions of decision-makers themselves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".