Gap-Talk: How the “Achievement Gap” Reproduces Settler Colonial Constructions of Race within the Ontario Public School System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore how the discourse of “achievement gaps” operates within settler colonialism. This study approached critical policy analysis (CPA) through a settler colonial theoretical lens and Critical Race Theory. Together, these theoretical frameworks provide a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which racism and settler colonialism operate within schools and education institutions. By using critical discourse analysis (CDA), I looked at documents from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) addressing the achievement and opportunity gaps. This analysis shows how these documents construct the notion of achievement as racialized in a way that upholds white settler property rights. The discourse of achievement gaps functions as a settler technology to include/exclude individuals simultaneously into the settler sector of the population. These findings have significant implications for those in educational policy research and practice interested in examining and addressing issues of power and inequality.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".