A Message from
Education Action: Toronto

July 5, 2011

What’s Happened to Poor Children in the TDSB Budget?
Fees and Fundraising
A Quiet Year for ARCs and PARTs
''Accountability on Steroids''
Culturally Engaged Pedagogy
Pedagogy and Politics
Reconceptualizing the Africentric School
A Provincial Election Kit

Dear Friends,

With a provincial election coming up in October and so many disturbing issues in front of us as the school year ends, it’s hard to know which of these issues to stress in the campaign and how to put them forward. The big issues, as always, involve money and what goes on in our classrooms.

The McGuinty government continues to hammer our local school boards financially, with the greatest harm being done to poor, racialized students, increasingly from immigrant backgrounds. As David Clandfield shows in the analysis below (supported by a “Fees and Fundraising” report from Social Planning Toronto and the Laidlaw Foundation), poor children in our schools continue to be short-changed in the education resources available to them. At the same time, as Janet Bojti tells us, the school closings determined by shrinking funds from the province are routinely imposed on the backs of the poor communities. All of this is a reflection of 14 years of provincial cutbacks. Isn’t it time for our trustees – as well as the rest of us – to take this issue to the hustings and demand a restructuring of our tax system so that the rich and the corporations start paying their fair share of social services like schools?

While this financial assault has continued in public education, McGuinty and Co. have also intensified the Harris madness of curriculum fragmentation (via “expectations”) and standardized testing. Gord Bambrick, an Ontario high school teacher, calls the process “Accountability on Steriods” and shows its increasing links to the privatization of our schools. It’s clear we have to find an effective public way to say No to standardized testing and to the official curriculum it polices.

We also have to find a way to describe approaches to curriculum and teaching that genuinely engage our students and look to a future of meaningful work and honest citizenship. Below, we offer three articles that take on this task in different areas of schooling. From OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling, Jeff Kugler and Nicole West-Burns provide a fine summary of what they call “culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy.” On another front, in resisting the criminalization of HIV – and issues like it – Tim McCaskell argues for a much deeper integration of politics and pedagogy. Finally, on the question of Africentric Schools (which will be before the TDSB again next year) Andrew Allan makes the case for reconceptualizing the curriculum of such schools using the principles of anti-racism education.

We’ve also included the ISARC Election Kit for 2011. We hope you find it useful.

Have a great summer.

In solidarity,

George Martell and Faduma Mohamed
Co-chairs Education Action: Toronto

School Board Budget Season Ends:
Toronto’s Model Schools for Inner Cities catch a break
but has anything really changed for the children of the poor?

David Clandfield

On my walk home from a doctor’s appointment one morning recently, I passed two inner city schools of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). One carried a big billboard announcing the school’s Facilities Renewal program (in a 10-year-old building with a 7-year-old yard). The words “Investing in Children” leapt from the billboard in bold type. Justification for spending taxpayers’ money on school buildings? The other carried a big announcement about an upcoming PART meeting for its family of schools. The TDSB’s Program Area Review Team process (the acronym was not explained on the notice) involves public consultation meetings to help the Board re-organize its programs in a group of neighbourhood schools. The process is viewed by many as the harbinger of a decision to close one of the schools in the group. That school building and its grounds can then be leased out or sold off. Saving taxpayers’ money by cashing in the investment in children?

Investing in children and the spectre of school closures: the public face of our inner-city schools. Children are an investment prospect; public property is disposable. Of course, we can easily disregard such ironies. Investment could be viewed as just an ill-chosen metaphor and school closure just one rational response to the current round of declining enrolments. But the two terms inadvertently point to a harsher reality for inner city education. And the annual school board budget season gives us another opportunity to reflect on that harsh reality and to suggest alternatives in both the short and long term.

Fees and Fundraising
Social Planning Toronto and the Laidlaw Foundation

School fees and fundraising activities create inequities between students, among schools and make the public school system less inclusive and accessible. Marginalized students suffer. The amount of money entering schools through grants meant to assist vulnerable students, such as the Learning Opportunities Grant, are often used to balance budget shortfalls across the system. Meanwhile private money entering schools through fees and fundraising is kept in the schools that raise the money.

Quiet Year for ARCs and PARTs
Janet Bojti

Program Area Review Team committees (P.A.R.T.s) and Accommodation Review Committees (A.R.C.s) were few in number from Sept 2010 to June 2011 when compared to the previous year. The TDSB reduced activity to stall the process until after the Provincial Election on Oct. 6th, 2011 in the hopes of eliminating the importance of school closings as an election issue. Toronto neighbourhoods can look forward to an onslaught of school closings in 2012.

In all four P.A.R.T. discussions this school year there was no mention of declining enrolment. Rather the opposite. New housing development and increasing urban density in those communities meant schools were looking for ways to increase in size. No controversial issues here.

The A.R.C.s were a different story. The TDSB attempted only two of them, one in Rexdale and the other in downtown Regent Park. Both target closing schools in low-income neighbourhoods; both have met with stiff community resistance. The results? The Board has temporarily discontinued the Rexdale accommodation review and there’s an angry downtown community ready to fight back against the closing of their school.

''Accountability on Steroids''
Gord Bambrick

Teachers know that results on high-stakes testing are not a fair indicator of school success. Schools don’t teach just numeracy and literacy. And, by any estimate, these subject areas don’t represent more than a fraction of the curriculum. Although no teacher would be foolish enough to claim that exams in two subject areas represent the sum of a child’s learning in all subjects over three years, this is what is sold to the public by both the government and the media. The government boasts about improved Education and Quality Accountability Office (EQAO) results; oversimplified headlines and sound bites do the rest.

Despite pretensions of helping the kids, it is increasingly evident that the real goal of testing is to put a spotlight on the supposed underperformance of public education. This is exactly how high-stakes testing gets used by dozens of pro-privatization think tanks, many of which, like Canada’s Fraser Institute, publish their school rankings in the media. These organizations know that all tests mathematically guarantee lots of “below average” schools and unhappy customers. This ratchets up parental paranoia, which then can be used to drive parents into the net of school choice—non-public alternatives that include vouchers, charter schools and home schooling. By perpetuating the EQAO tests and publishing results it knows will be used for school rankings, the government feeds into this narrowing of public perception.

Jeff Kugler and Nicole West-Burns
Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy

In an effort to support the professional development that CUS is providing to some urban schools within the Toronto District School Board, the Centre for Urban Schooling attempted to put “the meat on the bones” of what this work could look like and represent in our classrooms and schools. What might this look like when you are a teacher or administrator with this “lens”?

What happens in the school, in terms of leadership, school climate,
family/caregiver-school relations when this practice is occurring? We have put some ideas together and begun to share these ideas with educators about what schools, where all aspects embody the philosophy, might look like. The literature around culturally responsive and/or relevant pedagogy is very individually, teacher focused, without a push for overall school changes. In our minds, in order to really make the changes needed for students, we have to interrogate all aspects of our schools, in addition
to teacher practice as we attempt to make education more meaningful for the students who are at the most risk of being “pushed out” of school.

Our framework requires that schools examine their thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and actions in seven areas: Classroom Climate and Instruction; School Climate; Student Voice and Space; Family/Caregiver-School Relations; School Leadership; Community Connection; and Professional Development.

Politics and Pedagogy:
Disrupting the criminalization of HIV
Tim McCaskell

I would argue that efforts for long-term social change always need to combine politics and pedagogy — and the fact that they so often do not, is a serious weakness. Sometimes, however, a situation will arise requiring a response that includes both education and political mobilization. One such situation can be a pressing social problem that primarily affects a minority. On its own, the minority will not have the political weight to produce a concrete solution to its problem, especially if hegemonic discourses posit its interests as “special interests,” that run contrary to the “general interest” of the rest of society.

In order to succeed, the minority will need to construct a basis of unity around a goal that can mobilize a critical mass, a bloc of others beyond those directly affected. Only then will the minority convincingly be able to portray its interest as congruent with the “general interest.”

Reconceptualizing the Africentric school and curriculum
using the principles of anti-racism education
Andrew Allan

… Both the Africentric school and curriculum have been designed and developed within traditional notions of schooling and curriculum. The school board has developed their Africentric programs with the best of intentions; through established board procedures for developing curriculum guidelines and to reflect the standard Ontario Curriculum. Both were developed within the current or existing Eurocentric framework for thinking about schooling and curriculum. Consequently, the current model of the Africentric school may still employ the same values, cultural assumptions and practices as the mainstream school system. We may have lost sight of or have forgotten the meanings of some of the founding principles that were used to establish the Africentric school and curriculum in the first place.

Provincial Election Kit 2011
Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition

The provincial election that will take place on October 6, 2011 is an opportunity for each of us to exercise our responsibility as Ontario citizens. Our vote brings with it a responsibility not only to elect a person or a party but also to make that vote an expression of our belief in what that person and party says they are committed to do if elected.

Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, with more than 12.1 million residents, about 85% of whom live in urban centers. Many struggle on low incomes and are economically insecure. The 2006 Census showed that of the 11.9 million Ontarians living in private households, 11.1% (approximately 1.3 million men, women and children) had an after-tax income at or below the Low Income Cut-Off (LICO) established by Statistics Canada (Statistics Canada, 2008c).

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC) is a coalition representing a wide range of faith - communities in the province of Ontario with the shared hope that together we can contribute to new public policies based upon greater justice and dignity for Ontarians marginalized by poverty. The central message shared by religious communities inspires people of faith to respond to our neighbours in need.