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Education Action: Toronto's
Online Clearing House April 3, 2013 More Cuts, Less Democracy Hardening the Streaming System Rethinking Special Education, Part III Aboriginal and Black Children: Suspended and Jailed Our Teachers and Their Unions What about Girls? Student Strikes in Quebec and England |
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Dear Friends, It is hard to keep in mind all the dimensions of the continuing neo-liberal assault on our schools. At the moment, financial cuts are front and centre as the TDSB proposes to strip another $50 million from its budget, primarily as a result of ruthless provincial cutbacks that have ended up (as David Clandfield's article shows) targeting the poorest of our communities while seriously reducing school staff across the board. (The province will also be stripping another $39 million from the TDSB's operating grant.) Janet Bojti then highlights two particular impacts of these cuts: the slashing of school clericals and education assistants (staff cuts often overlooked by critics of Ministry austerity) and the closing down of local schools. For the broader impact on the continuing financial squeeze on Ontario schools, we've attached Vana Pistiolis's article from Our Schools/Our Selves on the "Growing Inequities in Ontario Public Schools." We are also including a Toronto Star opinion piece by Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessy from the Ontario Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. They argue that the money is there for social services like schools if the Ontario government uses the tools available to it: from returning the corporate tax rate to its pre-recession 14-per-cent level to increasing the income tax on the rich to insisting that all businesses pay the full Employer Health Tax. There is also the possibility of upping sales and gas taxes. These are political decisions that have to be made and can be made. Finally, we're attaching Campaign 2000's response to the recent federal budget. As expected, Harper and Co. ignored Canada's children. The cuts we're facing also highlight the growing lack of democracy in our school system, as local board trustees fold in the face of provincial threats to put them under supervision if they don't obey budget guidelines. At the same time, our school communities – with no serious organization among them and no united parent or teacher leadership – increasingly find themselves powerless to resist the impact of these cuts. There is, however, at least one small bright moment in all of this: Six TDSB trustees did manage to vote against these cuts: Atkinson, Chen, Glover, Kaplan, Rodrigues and Tonks. We thank them for it, and encourage them to help organize their communities in opposition to this government. This is also a moment when we want to wish trustee Irene Atkinson a full recovery from a disastrous fire at her home. As we send out this posting, Irene's condition is still very serious. But those of us who have known her courage and determination over so many years cannot imagine she won't win this fight and come back to us. The TDSB would be so much poorer without her. At the same time as we are experiencing this assault on school funding and local democracy, we are also watching the hardening of the neo-liberal "human capital" curriculum. This hardening was very much in evidence in last month's posting of Michael Fullan's launch of the "next stage of the Ontario Education Agenda." This month Fullan was backed up by a Globe and Mail opinion piece by Kevin Lynch, vice chair of BMO Financial Group . Like Fullan, Lynch sees Canada's relatively high international test scores as a marker of quality and wants our schools to press for a much tighter educational fit for jobs in a "fiercely competitive, global, knowledge economy" – pushing for a "K to work" school system "that's managed for quantifiable results." And like Fullan, Lynch loves the possibilities of more centralized shaping of this neo-liberal agenda through structured courses on the internet and the "flipped classroom." (Fullan calls this the "new pedagogy ... greatly accelerated by the new technologies that are rapidly coming on the scene.") For both there is no distinction between what's good for business and what's good for the society. And for both, what's good is always "measurable." What's missing, of course, is not only any of the substance of a good education but also any understanding of how our schools stratify and segregate children for an unjust society. We wonder how Kathleen Wynne, who used to know better, sleeps at night knowing who's calling the shots on how we bring up our kids in school. The cutbacks, the centralization and the hardening of curriculum we've touched on here all end up promoting a system of official profiling (or labeling) that nails down the placement of children into the various socially and racially divided streams the system has to offer. The creation these streams is where the neo-liberal rubber hits the road in our public schools – shaping the "pathways" students must follow to take their places in an increasingly stratified social order. At the centre of this profiling and streaming enterprise is Special Education, which David Clandfield has been examining in our last two issues as part of an ongoing series entitled "Rethinking Special Education." In this issue he moves on to the third part of that series called "Defining Learning Disability, Class Bias and the Extended Use of Individual Education Plans." Here he takes us through the "tortuous evolution of LD ... to see how sorting and streaming systems [including expanding IEPs] feed off each other to reinforce inequality and stratification." It's complex material, but very much worth our while to master; so many futures depend on major revisions of how we think about "special" education. Of course, the overrepresentation of poor and racialized children in institutional dead ends isn't limited to the bottom streams of the school system. As two recent articles (attached) in the Toronto Star remind us there is major overrepresentation of Black and Aboriginal students among students suspended by the TDSB and incarcerated in our jails for youth. (Black students were three times more likely to be suspended than white students in the 2006-7 school year, while Aboriginal students had an even higher suspension rate. In the young male jail population there are five times more Aboriginal boys in the young male jail population than what they represent in the general young male population. And for Black boys the proportion of jail admissions is four times higher.) In facing this neo-liberal agenda our teachers and their unions are still very much at loose ends. The position of teachers in our society is complex, contradictory and constantly shifting. It comes out of a long history in which teachers have been torn by the need to behave both as responsible community-minded professionals and as badly treated state workers requiring active union protection. The end product of this history is often political paralysis – especially in the coalition politics required in the building of a strong public school system. These conflicting needs and the ongoing paralysis of our teacher unions are very much in evidence in the current battle between Ontario teachers and the McGuinty/Wynne government. What our teacher unions haven't been able to do is to resolve this kind of conflict on behalf of their members. They haven't yet managed to build a union that not only looks after the material well-being of teachers but also focuses on their teaching lives and the general well-being of their students. The rhetoric is there, of course, as well as the occasional initiative, but mostly it's the wages and working conditions side of teaching that gets all the attention. The continuing neo-liberal financial assault on education doesn't make this resolution any easier, with cuts in wages and benefits constantly on the line in negotiations. As Thomas Walkom argues in the attached article from the Toronto Star, we should see the current assault on our teachers through Bill 115 as part of a more general attack on collective bargaining (still focused on wages and working conditions). In this backs-against-the-wall context, "business" unionism as opposed to broader "social" unionism still seems like the realistic option for our teacher unions. It's not, of course, as the current withdrawal of services (treating the schools like regular capitalist workplaces) by our teacher unions continues to alienate possible parent allies and weakens community support. Ironically, once the decision to boycott extra-curriculars was made, the continued commitment of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario to hang tough provided the only possible leverage to effectively change government policy. As we go to post, however, ETFO (following OSSTF's unhelpful example) has "suspended its advice" to members to take "a pause" regarding "voluntary/extracurricular activities." The membership was told that private discussions with the government led to the decision to withdraw from the current protest. Unfortunately, while the union abandoned its one serious point of leverage in this struggle, it did not make public "the concrete items of importance to our members" that had been won. The result is that many activists remain bewildered and disillusioned. As one elementary teacher wrote on Facebook: "ETFO members agreed (for the most part) to stand together and fight. We stood proud while the public spoke disgusting words regarding our profession. We cancelled Christmas concerts, class trips, choirs, club teams ... all at the direction of our union. Now they are backing down. This taxing and difficult year has been for nothing. We have made no difference." That judgment, it appears, is largely true, though it now emerges (out of the still officially secret OSSTF agreement, which is likely to be passed on to ETFO) that teachers with less than ten years experience will be compensated for their loss of banked sick days at 25 cents to the dollar rather than 10 cents. It also seems that savings from previously imposed contracts might be used to sweeten other sections of the contracts now being renegotiated[1], though not by very much. Certainly, there is no serious extra money on the table; the province has just proposed new education cuts for 2013-14. Overall, from press reports, there is likely to be some shifting of educational resources around areas of sick days, unpaid days off, retirement gratuities and maternity leave provisions. And the premier tells us that teachers will be treated with "more respect" at the bargaining table, which may mean, as Martin Regg Cohn suggests, "a more coherent bargaining framework." What all this might mean in the real lives of teachers remains a mystery. And when it becomes clear, both ETFO and OSSTF members will be voting on a contract having abandoned the limited weapon they had at their disposal. It's bad politics all round. That doesn't mean, of course, that the overall teacher strike/protest against Bill 115 didn't have some impact. It's reminded the Wynne government that teachers still have some fight in them when facing new austerity measures. But it could have been so much more effective. What has been missing in this protest/strike is a coalition of students, parents, teachers and community activists that takes on a much broader program of school reform (including fair bargaining practices, but not neglecting curriculum and testing reform and proper funding) and organizes politically, starting at the neighbourhood school level. One approach to this kind of "social" unionism among teachers can be found in a recent presentation by Bob Peterson on the BCTF YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-wrbOC_zwM. Peterson is founding editor of Rethinking Schools and the current president of the Milwaukee Teachers Association. His talk is entitled "What does it mean to be a Social Justice Teacher?" There is also no question that there is serious rank-and-file unrest among our teachers. Unhappiness among the members of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association at the weakness of their union in standing up to Bill 115 has led to the return of its former president, James Ryan, – a thoughtful and progressive teacher leader – to the top job at OECTA. And in the attached article on dissent within the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation by David Bush and Doug Nesbitt it's clear that a lot of public high school teachers in the province want their union to represent them in the community and with the government in a stronger and more effective way. There is no easy road here to reconstructing the role of our teacher unions. As much as possible, here at the Education Action: Toronto Clearing House we'll try to keep you in touch with the movement for reform within our teacher organizations. It's going to be complicated, however, and hard to analyze. We rely on you all out there to help us get this story straight. One thing we should keep in mind, as Harry Smaller's attached article shows us, is that there is a long history of top-down control and reconstruction of teacher's work and learning. Our school system is a dense structure of bureaucratic control, and it is no easy matter for teachers and communities to find their way to freedom and community responsibility. Good people outside the school system often forget this and blame teachers for policies and structures they had little to do with. Potentially, of course, teachers retain an extraordinary capacity to help change those policies and structures. In this, they need all the support we can give them. In all of the discussion of the neo-liberal assault on our schools, there has been far too little time spent on the "masculine culture" of neo-liberalism and its impact on girls, particularly those from poor and racialized neighbourhoods. In the attached article, "Doing Just Fine?" Alison Gaymes San Vincente opens up this issue directly, and, we hope, encourages others to write to us on this subject. We reach into Doug Little's blog (www.thelittleeducationreport.com) again this month for a look at Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak's educational agenda. "Is Mr. Nasty fading to Black?" Doug asks. From Our Schools/Our Selves, in our continuing coverage of the Quebec Student Strike, we're attaching long-time Windsor labour activist Len Wallace's reflections on the strike and the lessons we can all learn from it. And, as a companion piece, we are including an interview with Maia Pal on the student occupation at the University of Sussex in England. The interview by Jeffery Webber is taken from The Bullet, a very useful source of solid and accessible analytic pieces produced by the "Socialist Project" centred at York University. It's definitely worth your while to subscribe. Finally, we're attaching four statistical documents: on racialized inequality; ward poverty in Toronto; widening inequality in Ontario; and immigration in Toronto. They're a little bit out of date, but still very useful. We figure better late than never. Please forgive our website (www.educationactiontoronto.com) being down for the last couple of weeks. It's the result of major technical problems with our server, who passes on his profound apology. It should be up and running very soon, and perhaps even by the time you receive this posting. In solidarity, David Clandfield, George Martell, Faduma Mohamed, Dudley Paul Education Action: Toronto Editorial Board |
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TDSB Cuts to Teachers for Poor Children David Clandfield On March 6 of this year, the Toronto District School Board voted for drastic staff cuts in its 2013-14 School-Based Staffing plan. While the number of elementary teachers did go up to meet the needs of the new all-day kindergarten classes, 248 secondary school teacher positions were axed. Hidden inside these changes are significant cuts in the number of teachers allocated to the education of students in low-income neighbourhoods. Most notable among these cuts is a drop in what are called Learning Opportunities in secondary schools, code for teachers in inner city schools, from the 60 of this year to 30 for next year, a 50% reduction. Two stories have gone out to the media to explain this: one is that the cuts are the fault of declining enrolment and the other message is that deep down the cuts are all the fault of the Provincial Government. These stories are true in a general sense, and we should acknowledge that first, but as an explanation of cuts to teachers of poor children, they are deeply misleading...
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Slashing School Clericals and Education Assistants:
The More the Board Cuts,
The Harder the Province Squeezes
Janet Bojti An elementary school office clerk held up two letters, one in each hand, and said, "This one," she held it high in the air, "is from Chris Spence (former Director of Education) inviting me to a special ceremony to receive an Award of Excellence. And this one," in her left hand, "is a letter from the Board telling me I'll be surplus as of this June. I got them both on the same day." She had worked in this large elementary school for over 30 years. She was now attending to the children of the children she had seen through the school when she first began her job. The parents dearly loved and valued her and had lobbied for the award. Hers was one of 200 in school clerical positions the Board had decided to cut in June 2012. The impact of cutting 200 school clericals was bitter. The board actually implemented the mass layoff by treating it as a slash to 400 half time positions...
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The School Closings Continue at the TDSB Janet Bojti In North Toronto's tree-lined residential streets front lawns are sprouting signs saying, "Save Our Communities." Parents and home-owners filled Lawrence Park C. I. to learn the Board's intentions concerning proposed boundary changes for four neighbourhood elementary schools. At stake are property values, the distance children walk to school and whether or not children will have to change schools. Local school trustee, Howard Goodman has backed away from the Program Area Review declaring a conflict of interest. Three of the four schools are overcrowded. Allenby Jr. P.S. has a total enrolment of 793 children in a building designed to hold 654. Armour Heights has 367 pupils in a school designed to hold 305. John Ross Robertson Jr. P.S. has 589 children in a school with a capacity 536. North Preparatory, the smallest of the four, has 204 children is a school building built to accommodate 210 children...
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Growing Inequities in Ontario's Public Schools Vana Pistiolis Public education should be democratic, transparent and the great equalizer whereby every student, regardless of circumstance, can rely on the public school system to provide them with a high quality education. To ensure this, public funding should be made available at the government level to fully support a robust and complete curriculum for all students. However, Ontario schools have been grossly under-funded since 1997, originating with the Conservative government of former Premier Mike Harris, and have since taken on additional costs (Social Planning Toronto, 2011, p. 54) creating an increasing need and pressure to fundraise at a time when poverty rates are climbing. Ontario's growing education cuts, whether imposed with an agenda or not, pressure schools to compete and rely on corporate partnerships. The fundraising trend shows that the reliance on private and corporate money in the public school system is increasing, making today's potential threat of privatization a real possibility in the future...
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Austerity is holding back Ontario's Economy Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessy ... Here's the conversation we should be having: Ontario has the tax room to rebuild its fiscal capacity, to protect the services we count on. There are plenty of options at hand. Just returning the corporate tax rate to its pre-recession 14-per-cent level could generate a potential $2.5 billion. Large corporations are simply taking the tax cuts and sitting on their growing profits. Besides, the corporate-tax-rate race to the bottom that the cuts were supposed to win is already over. The United States, with its own fiscal problems, has dropped out. It's time for Ontario to do the same. More low-hanging fruit: Ontario's richest have been enjoying the lion's share of economic gains. Ontario could ask them to contribute more. A two-point higher income tax rate for Ontarians earning more than $250,000 has the potential to generate up to $700 million in additional revenue. Want more?
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Nothing in the Budget for Children Campaign 2000 Today's federal budget ignores Canada's children, says Campaign 2000. There's little in this budget for the 979,000 low-income children and their parents who feel the double burden of job loss and economic stress at home. Instead, the budget puts deficit reduction ahead of human development and has not even a hint of a vision for a future in which modern-day families are decently supported. Going into this budget, Campaign 2000 was looking for a mix of social infrastructure and effective income supports to reduce Canada's 14.5% rate of child and family poverty. Instead, it is silent on family income security and on early childhood education and care, in no way responding to Parliament's 2009 unanimous vote to "develop an immediate plan to eradicate poverty for all."
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Learning Disability, Class Bias, and the Use of IEPs David Clandfield Education Action: Toronto is publishing a series of articles on Special Education arising from a recent research report published by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in late 2010. The Brown-Parekh report is a rich repository of data that pose serious questions about the equity of the assessment, identification, placement and education of students designated as having special needs. Time and again we find evidence of the disproportionately high numbers of students from poor and racialized backgrounds in some special needs categories, such as Mild Intellectual Disabilities (MID) and Behavioural; and disproportionately low numbers of the same groups of students in the Gifted category. But the situation is different where one particular exceptionality is concerned, Learning Disabilities. Students from all income levels seem to be distributed more or less evenly among those identified as having a Learning Disability according to the TDSB data. However, hidden behind this is a history that belies the apparent lack of class bias in this Special Education category. And part of that history may explain the rising use of Individual Education Plans that are assigned without the identification of an exceptional condition. That is what this third article tries to unravel.
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Unequal Justice: Aboriginal and Black Inmates disproportionately fill Ontario Jails Jim Rankin and Patty Winsa Blacks and aboriginal people are overrepresented in Ontario's youth and adult jails, with some staggering ratios that mirror those of blacks in American jails. A Star analysis of Ontario jail data, obtained by University of Toronto doctoral candidate Akwasi Owusu-Bempah through freedom of information requests, shows:
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Toronto school suspension rates highest for Black and Aboriginal students Jim Rankin, Kristin Rushowy, Louise Brown Black students were three times more likely to be suspended than white students in the 2006-7 school year, according to data released to the Star by the Toronto District School Board. Black students make up only about 12 per cent of high school students in the Toronto public board – about 32,000 – yet account for more than 31 per cent of all suspensions. White students account for some 29 per cent of suspensions, but make up nearly one-third of the entire student body. This disproportionate rate is revealed in a board analysis of a student survey conducted at the height of much-criticized – and now scrapped – provincial zero-tolerance school disciplinary regime. The analysis is based on the most recent data available connecting race and suspension rates.
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Attack on Ontario Teachers is Part of a Trend Thomas Walkom The festering Ontario teachers' dispute is not about wages and extracurricular activities, although these are the current flashpoints. It is not about whether teachers should be forced by law to coach soccer in their off hours as Tim Hudak's Conservatives demand. Nor is it about eliminating the province's deficit as Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne suggests. It is not much about teachers at all. At its heart, this fight is about work. It is about the implicit deal struck between governments, employers and employees more than 50 years ago to make the workplace a fairer place. It is about the unravelling of that deal...
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Dissent Brews in the OSSTF David Bush and Doug Nesbitt Over a month has passed since Bill 115 was repealed by the Ontario Liberals, but the contracts imposed on the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) and Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO) remain intact and effectively unchallenged. This has led to several incidents of open dissent from the ranks of OSSTF in particular. Throughout the short life of Bill 115, OSSTF members have pushed their union to take a more defiant direction such as that taken by ETFO. Dissent boiled over in November when a number of OSSTF districts rejected tentative agreements being negotiated within Bill 115's framework. In response, OSSTF leaders were compelled to cancel future ratification votes and finally implement province-wide work-to-rule, as ETFO worked toward rotating one-day, district-wide strikes in December. However, the provincial leadership of OSSTF is still showing an unwillingness to pursue any sort of collective protest against the effects of Bill 115. On February 22, the OSSTF Provincial Council, at the Provincial Executive's recommendation, voted to suspend the boycott of extra-curricular (EC) and voluntary activities. This has left ETFO as the only union still refusing to budge on boycotting ECs in protest. The OSSTF decision is yet another example of how union leaders have one-by-one capitulated to the government, undermining any prospects of cooperative and united efforts to defeat the government's attacks on education workers and collective bargaining...
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Teachers' Work and Learning – A Conceptual Overview Harry Smaller ... Where are teachers, in all of this? While recent calls for reforms in education continue to range across the many dimensions of schooling - funding, governance, curriculum, resources, facilities, etc. - teachers themselves seem to have been singled out for special attention, in unprecedented ways. Historically, when teachers were seen to be in need of "improvement," strategies for change were often asked for and/or initiated collectively. For example, educational change was often associated with the need to improve conditions for teachers - class sizes, resources, salaries, benefits, pensions and job security. Even where teachers were seen to be in need of further education themselves, governments at various levels often moved to expand and improve teacher education programs, and/or to offer generic incentives for teachers to engage in further study, whether in pre-service or in-service models (Hopkins, 1969; Robinson, 1971; Fleming, 1972). In the past two decades however, there has been a dramatic shift from this more collective approach to one of focus on the individual teacher. This theme dominates the ways in which teachers' work is being restructured and controlled (see, for example, Gleeson and Husbands, 2003; Mahony et. al., 2003). Moreover individualization is also dominant in the ways in which teachers are increasingly being educated, trained, evaluated and tested. (Holmes Group, 1990; Labaree, 1992; Darling-Hammond, 1998; OECD, 1998; Ontario Government, 2000). In many areas of the USA, salaries, promotion, and even basic job tenure for individual teachers are increasingly being determined by teacher testing regimes, by increased external evaluation of teachers' classroom practice, and/or by student "scores" on standardized examinations (see, for example, Medina, 2008). While these measures have yet to gain a foothold in Canada, in at least one province (Ontario), student results from external examinations now appear in the public press, displayed on a school press, displayed on a school-by-school basis. The implications for individual teachers in these schools seem clear...
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Doing Just Fine?
Giving Attention to the Needs and Interests of Girls?
Alison Gaymes San Vincente It was following the January 2010 launch of the mentorship program Young Women on the Move (YWM)1 in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) that a reporter asked "Why a girl's group?" In fact, this is a rather common question whenever work with young women is discussed. I suppose this is a fair question given that girls are often portrayed as routinely outperforming the boys in academics, suspended less in public schools, underrepresented in special education programs, applying to post secondary institutions at a higher rate, and having the same rights as males in a "gender-neutral" Canada. Based on this image it would appear that girls are "doing just fine" and that the need for a focus on girls is marginal at best. However, a critical examination of the state of girls paints quite a different picture; an image materializes that does not support the "doing just fine" depiction. The Toronto Star revealed this contradiction with the February 23, 2010 headline, "Women's Rights in Decline". This article was speaking to a newly released status of women and girls in Canada report called "Reality Check" (FIFIA, 2010).2 A reality check is indeed required when discourse suggests that girls continue to be up against a masculine culture of schooling which articulates and reinforces acceptable notions of "being a girl", notions that are oppressive in nature. Thus, the need for continued attention to girls is imperative. If teachers do not intervene we become complicit in maintaining the same social norms that have served to oppress girls. A focus on girls, through education, could manifest within effective mentorship groups and other forms of critical programming. To begin to understand the need to focus on girls and subsequently how to address their issues, we must first consider how they are socialized and the implications of such socializations in the context of public education...
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The Hudak Agenda Doug Little ...Hudak and the Tories seem to believe that because they hate public education and public health care (or anything else that starts with public) that everybody else does. The Tories have a staggering gender gap. Their testosterone filled macho posturing turns off women faster than it attracts men. He wants to delay all-day kindergarten for those who don't have it yet, women get angry. He wants to raise class sizes, women get angrier. He wants to slash 10,000 non-teaching jobs in public education. Guess what, they are about 90% women and women get it. This guy verges on misogynist in his total disregard for women's priorities for public policy. Has this guy ever heard of the "soccer mom's vote" suburban middle class minivan driving women who can go either way on politics until someone attacks health and/or education? ...
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Lessons from the Quebec Student General Strike Len Wallace My spouse and I sat on the edge of our seats watching the televised images of thousands upon thousands of Quebec students marching through the streets of Montreal carrying banners, beating pots and pans, carrying banners, congregating from neighborhoods supported by the communities. We would have given our eye teeth to be in the midst of these exhilarating mass rallies – a youthful insurgency full of hope and determination when the collective synergistic energy produces moments when "anything is possible". The next morning we too cut out square pieces of red cloth, pinning them to our clothes to show our solidarity, angered by the commentary of politicians and media pundits who saw in this movement only a destructive anomaly to the usual "democratic process". We watched, frustrated from the vantage point of Windsor, Ontario, described by one of our Canadian Auto Worker friends and activists as "Ground Zero" of the neo-liberal economic onslaught – a community not only under siege, but crumbling with the country's highest unemployment rate, decimation of the auto industry, thinning private sector union ranks, attacks on the public service unions, attacks on teachers unions, cutbacks of public services, education, health services, falling wage rates and a working class anger often turning divisively inward itself. You can feel the desperation and fear on the streets. There has been a thrilling and heartening rise of hopes and expectations for the possibilities of mass democratic action and even that of a radical emancipatory project opened by the general strike of students in Quebec this past year. What is important to understand is that this strike was not a momentary or symbolic event staged for one or even several days, but an energetic, sustained democratic movement over several months challenging the State and de-legitimizing its authority. This, despite the misinformation spread by media, has caused excitement amongst activists across Canada and presents a challenge to the organised labour movement and the left. It is incumbent upon us in the rest of Canada to understand what has made this experience unique to Quebec and yet draw from it important lessons in terms of tactics, strategies and vision to apply to our different historical circumstances...
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Occupation at the University of Sussex An Interview with Maia Pal The last two years have seen an explosion of student strikes from Chile to Italy to Quebec. These do not yet account for a full-blown student revolt, but they are seeds of political resistance that are some of the most promising in quite some time. They have been remarkable in their tactical ingenuity, the steadfastness of the student rebels and the militancy of demands for the decommodification of education and the universality of access. The fierceness of the austerity agenda in Britain is opening up a new front in student struggles. After three weeks, an impressive student occupation at the University of Sussex against the privatization of services on campus is still in full-swing, even expanding, with flash occupations and disruptions of different buildings and events on campus last Friday. On February 28 I sat down with Maia Pal, a leading organizer of the campaign, to discuss its origins and dynamics to date. — Jeffery R. Webber.
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Falling Behind The Ontario Common Front Thirteen million of the most highly educated people in the world call Ontario home. Endowed with rich natural resources, vast tracts of farmland, quadrillions of litres of freshwater, the rugged beauty of the Canadian Shield, and an industrial hub that stretches across its southern reaches; it is almost inconceivable that this province houses a generation of residents who are experiencing the largest increase in inequality in this province's history. Yet the evidence is indisputable. Ontario is falling behind the rest of Canada in terms of growing poverty, increasing inequality and flagging financial support for vital public services. Undeniable, also, is the fact that it is not the inexorable march of global economics alone, but rather choices – choices in public budgets, and in economic and social policy – that have failed to rein in the increasing income inequality distributed by the private market and aided in propelling us down this path. Today, six hundred thousand Ontario families find their incomes stalled or falling behind, while the richest ten per cent gallop away with the bounty from the sustained period of economic growth stretching from the mid-1990s to 2008...
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Racialized Inequality Canadian Census 2006 Graphs showing poverty rates for racialized groups: communities of colour and also recent immigrants (the majority of whom are from racialized groups).
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Toronto Newcomer Strategy City of Toronto Toronto is one of the most multicultural urban areas in the world. Each year tens of thousands of people from around the globe choose our city as their new home. Their diverse cultures and communities have helped create Toronto's identity as a vibrant global city. Toronto has a comprehensive set of resources in place to help newcomers settle and integrate. However they can be difficult to access. Many newcomers are unaware of all the supports available to help them when they need it most. As a result, many face difficulties integrating into the city's social, economic and cultural landscape. The Toronto Newcomer Strategy is designed to improve newcomer settlement through shared leadership, stronger collaboration and a more seamless and well-coordinated service system.
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44 "Action on Poverty" Ward Profiles Alliance for a Poverty-Free Toronto & Social Planning Toronto The Alliance for a Poverty-Free Toronto and Social Planning Toronto have released a series of 44 "Action on Poverty" profiles – one for each ward in the City of Toronto. These profiles provide basic information about the numbers and demographics of individuals living in poverty in Toronto, as well as comparisons with the city-wide statistics for the same indicators. This statistical information is coupled with an example of a locally based initiative that is challenging poverty in each ward – local residents and organizations taking "Action on Poverty." Taken together, these 44 profiles present a detailed picture of the face of poverty across our city, along with a compelling portrait of the many ways in which Torontonians are coming together to respond to this critical issue.
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This email was sent by Education Action: Toronto 1698 Gerrard St. East, Toronto, On. M4L 2B2 |