Being Chosen and Performing Choice: Young People Engaging in Imaginative and Constrained Secondary School Practices in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Abstract

Over the last three decades, the political project of school choice policy, promoted by the Vancouver School District and the BC Ministry of Education, has been contentious.Many have contended that school choice further contributes to the fragmentation and associated hierarchies of the education system and of social structures in the urban context of Vancouver, a major city with rapidly rising ethnic diversity and socio-economically polarizing urban redevelopment. To shed further light on these concerns about school choice, in this study I investigate the ways in which young people, ages 11-19, positioned at various social, racial, and geographic locations and with varied social experiences, make sense of school choice policy. Here I focus particularly on the ways in which young people imagine, experience, and form certain modes of social, spatial, and racial identification and groups, as well as on the relationships between these groups under the mechanism of school choice.Between 2009 and 2010, I carried out a multi-sited ethnographic study from a critical sociophenomenological perspective. I conducted 59 semi-structured interviews with students in transition (Grades 7, 8, and 12), observed 16 school information evenings and two secondary schools over a six-month period, and analyzed media discourses and policy texts as they pertained to broader social, urban, and political changes. I drew upon an interdisciplinary analytical framework of critical policy studies and youth studies and focused on three theoretical concepts: the imaginary, the imagination, and imaginary capital. These three concepts provide a key analytical framework for understanding the ways in which school choice complicates young people's classification struggles and distinction-making (Bourdieu, 1984) within the widely circulating dominant social, urban, and national imaginary. I iii conclude that while current local policies of school choice can provide enriched alternative programs, they do so for only highly selective and competitive groups of students. Overall, my research findings point to the reality that school choice deepens existing social, spatial, and racial divisions, aggravates tensions, and ultimately worsens existing inequalities while producing new forms of social and educational stratification in the rapidly diversifying global city of Vancouver.iv

RETRACTED: Continual Learning Approach for Continuous Data Stream Analysis in Dynamic Environments

“…The direct use of traditional neural network models for streaming data analysis is often impossible because of their computing power and memory constraints, so they cannot be implemented with limited computing resources [3]. Dynamic data streams should preferably be sampled without retraining to avoid the catastrophic problem of forgetting and adapting to the learning environment's nature [3,4]. These characteristics are not reflected effectively in dynamic environments with changing dynamic data streaming properties.…”

How do marginalized families engage school choice in inequitable urban landscapes? A critical geographic approach

“…Overall, although school choice has had some, albeit limited, positive academic and social mobility effects on disadvantaged students, overall it has had marginalizing consequences for lowincome and ethnic minority youths and neighborhoods (DeLuca & Dayton, 2009;Reay & Lucey, 2004;Yoon, 2013). In some cases, school choice has gained international momentum through the grassroots actions of low-income minority communities who wish to create "emancipatory" school spaces for ethnic minority families.…”

Introduction to the special issue: Studying school choice in Canada

“…What we do know is that more and more parents are spending their own time and resources on fundraising (Winton, 2016). Individual parents are paying extra fees and fieldtrip costs for the students who are enrolled in enriched programs (Yoon, 2013(Yoon, , 2016. Hence, it is difficult to assess whether the reductions in government spending on education in fact translates into cost-effectiveness overall, or whether these reductions have been simply replaced by individual parents who bear these costs.…”

“…Families who cannot choose, or who send their children to schools located in neighborhoods with low cultural, economic, and social capital, tend to be further excluded and demoted in market approaches to education (Taylor & MacKay, 2008;Yoon, 2017). Concerns have thus been raised about the extent to which school choice erodes societal goals such as social cohesion and equity in the education systems that promote individual choice and competition (Gaskell, 2001;Levine-Rasky, 2008;Yoon & Gulson, 2010) Finally, an ethnographic study of school choice that focuses on the students' perspective indicates that while the students who are enrolled in enriched programs in public schools of choice experience academic advantage, they also feel stressed, socially challenged, and spatially displaced when crossing boundaries between schools in a city with a high level of inequality and spatial division (Yoon, 2013(Yoon, , 2015(Yoon, , 2016. Also, since most popular schools tend to be located in affluent neighborhoods, it is often students from marginalized neighborhoods who have to travel far to attend them, thus making it more challenging for those children who attend schools outside their neighborhoods (Yoon, 2015).…”