Legal and Policy Implications for Early Childhood Professionals in Ontario's Kindergarten Programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The integration of child care and early education systems has been driving staffing change in early learning environments globally over the past decade. Rationales for staff integration often include concurrent movements to professionalize and regularize the early childhood sector. The legal and policy implication of systems integration in Ontario includes the movement of a largely unionized private non-profit sector workforce into the realm of public education in Full Day Kindergarten (FDK). Ontario was the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce a team teaching model comprised of a Registered Early Childhood Educator (RECE) and Kindergarten Teacher, bringing approximately 10,000 new RECEs into the public education sector. At the same time, the College of Early Childhood Educators was also established to develop standards of practice and provide public accountability for early childhood professionals.This thesis explores the new "professional" role of the RECE within the integrated FDK staff team in the education sector and the concurrent movement to professionalize and regularize the early childhood profession in Ontario. Through a series of four interrelated manuscripts that use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches including feminist legal policy research and text analysis, this compilation thesis documents the legal and policy impact of FDK staffing policy, and how it has influenced the way the new professional RECE role in FDK is being developed through legislation, policy and practice. By conceptualizing professionalization as a site of struggle and using feminist legal and policy research perspectives to understand policy implementation, I describe ways in which policy makers can have a more meaningful impact through FDK program implementation at all levels, and disclose strategies on how the policy intent of a more professional status and role for RECEs in Ontario's education system can be realized.
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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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| 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".