Abstract
This chapter is written retrospectively about a research project that was conducted from 2002 to 2004. Although the data is perhaps not as temporally significant as it was when it was generated, it continues to be worthy of attention. My purpose is to revisit one critical incident in the implementation of a major accountability reform, the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). The critical incident revolved around what became known as the “1985 cut-off”. This expression referred to the last year of birth of students considered to have pre-OSSLT status; that is, students born in 1985 or before were assumed to be beyond Grade 10 in 2002, the year of the first OSSLT, and therefore not required to write the test. In this chapter, following Foucault (1984), I analyse the 1985 cut-off as an “event” (p. 88).
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Spencer, B.L. (2012). Counting in, Counting Out, and Accounting For. In: Spencer, B.L., Gariepy, K.D., Dehli, K., Ryan, J. (eds) Canadian Education. SensePublishers, Rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-861-2_9
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