Education Action: Toronto's
Online Clearing House


May 3, 2013
The Fiscal Squeeze at the TDSB
Selling Schoolyards, Cutting Music Programs
The Campaign for Public Education
Green and Red: Sustainable Education and a Just Society
Paying Attention to Girls and Boys
Testing in Texas
Mirror Images: Canadian and American Childcare
Bottom Streaming in “Applied” Courses
Revolving Doors in the Director’s Office


Dear Friends,

To keep you up to date on the ongoing TDSB budget struggle with provincial “austerity,” we’re pleased to offer the most recentTDSB Budget Primer from Toronto Social Planning by Sharma Queiser, Lesley Johnston and David Clandfield. It shows the continuing hammering of programs for poor, racialized and immigrant children alongside another staff-reduction cut of $27.7 million plus another $27.3 million cut promised for the operating budget in June. Toronto Social Planning has just begun a campaign to stem the under funding of marginalized kids; the campaign launch is May 6 and your invitation is attached below.

So far, most trustees seem to have given up the fight on these cuts. Again, we want to say to them: Vote against these cuts. Re-allocate the diverted equity-based funding to its intended purpose. And help rally your communities to stand up to the province and insist on better funding. Parent activists should also press their local trustees to take this route and, at the same time, make life difficult for their MPPs on this file. With a provincial election possibly around the corner, this could be a winning strategy – at least this time around. Keeping this in mind, we are also attaching Trustee Chris Glover’s analysis of how the most recent provincial financial pressure on the TDSB has led to selling off sections of schoolyards and threatens a big chunk of the music program. These are big issues for local parents.

In finding a way to build a politics that can successfully take on provincial austerity in our schools, we want to remind our readers of the good work the Campaign for Public Education continues to do and pass on its most recent statement of purposes. The Campaign welcomes new individual members and representatives of community groups. You can reach them at www.campaignforpubliceducation.ca.

In the midst of all this budget slashing, the good stuff that school reformers actually manage to pull off often gets lost in the immediate struggle for funds. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work so many green activists have put in at the TDSB. To reconnect you to this work, we asked Elise Houghton to update her article on “Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability.”1 We are also attaching two recent articles from Monthly Review, a magazine we continue to recommend, and one whose archives are entirely accessible on its website, www.monthlyreview.org. The articles are free for those, whose finances are tight, but subscriptions are really appreciated; they’re essential for the survival of this extraordinary magazine. The two articles attached make two essential points: that we are facing a “planetary emergency,” an “ecological Armageddon,” and that the solution lies not only in resolutely effective green legislation, backed by popular will, but also requires fundamental change in the social system we call capitalism. The articles underscore the enormous importance of green activism in our schools as well as in those corners of the bureaucracy where activists have secured a foothold. We also recommend that you subscribe to Green Teacher – a fine Canadian-based magazine (with a broad North American reach). You can find them at www.greenteacher.com. Finally, we’re including poems by Pablo Neruda and Denise Levertov that make the point – however much denial is in the air (and everywhere else) – that there is no getting around the need to love life and to love the earth.

We want to remind you, as well, of the good work done in many of our schools’ mentoring programs by attaching two articles by Alison Gaymes San Vincente and Ramon San Vincente on programs, which they were central in developing for the TDSB. Their articles are also important because they recognize that girls and boys are socialized differently, with enormous impact on both their present and future lives. At the same time, while their articles present separate mentoring programs for girls and boys, they do not encourage separate gender-based schooling of the sort senior administration at the TDSB has been pressing of late. In fact, it would be fair to say that their approach to mentoring should have real resonance to teaching in the regular classroom.

In opposition to the caring and socially purposeful education supported by the Vincentes, we continue to bring you reports from the U.S. on the enormously destructive impact of standardized testing, which we see continuing to grow here in Ontario. Attached is a posting by Kari Anne, a blogger from Texas, responding to her experience of standardized testing in her home state. You can reach her blog at www.haikuoftheday.com.

Martha Friendly, in the next article, follows up our experience of shared standardized testing with her comparison of American and Canadian childcare. For all our feeling that we live in a more humane society here than in the U.S., when you look at how we treat our children, there’s often not much to chose. When Friendly compares American and Canadian childcare practices, she finds they’re a mirror image of each other. Furthermore, according to a 25-country UNICEF study, we both have one of the lowest rankings in terms of childcare access and quality benchmarks. And, it seems, Canada spends even less money on ECEC than the U.S.

It’s good to see People for Education taking on the issue of bottom streaming in our high school “Applied” courses (see the report below). In spite of the organization’s embarrassing support for a whole range of government policies that cover up or encourage social class and racial stratification (from the “student success strategy” to “co-op” to pre-“apprenticeship” programs to EQAO “standards”), this report is full of solid research showing the extent to which there is an overrepresentation of poor and racialized students in Applied courses. It is well worth your time to read it.

We leave the last word for Janet Bojti in her “Wanted: Captain for a Sinking Ship.” The amalgamation of Metro Toronto school boards into the TDSB, it seems, brought us more than a dysfunctional and oppressive handmaiden of the provincial government. It also brought us an astonishing turnover in exceptionally well-paid directors.

In solidarity,

George Martell, David Clandfield, Faduma Mohamed, Dudley Paul
Education Action: Toronto Editorial Board


1Elise Houghton’s article was originally in The School as Community Hub: Beyond Education’s Iron Cage, ed. David Clandfield and George Martell, Ottawa, (Our Schools/Our Selves, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), Summer 2010.

TDSB Budget Primer
Sharma Queiser, Lesley Johnson and David Clandfield


… Given the LOG and ESL funds, it would seem our most marginalized students are protected; however, deep-rooted problems in the Province’s funding formula leave the TDSB struggling to stretch the total Ministry allocated funds to balance its budget. To address this issue the TDSB diverts a portion of the LOG and the ESL grant for general use – at the expense of students who have the least voice.

The TDSB routinely spends approximately 2/3 of the LOG and 1/4 of the ESL grant on other purposes, such as paying for higher energy costs and the full cost of Full Day Kindergarten. This trend is continuing in the 2013-2014 budget cycle. Despite the fact that enrollment in elementary schools is growing, with student need remaining constant, $1.7 million from the Model School’s teaching staff budget was cut – equaling 18 teaching staff positions dedicated to inner city student education.

The LOG and ESL grants are being redistributed throughout the system when they should be spent to support students from low-income, racialized and marginalized neighbourhoods.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Queiser, Johnson and Clandfield – TDSB Budget Primer
Click HERE to download:
SAVE THE DATE: CAMPAIGN LAUNCH, MONDAY, MAY 6th 2013

Severing and Selling Schoolyards, Cutting Music Programs
Chris Glover


A Letter to Etobicoke Centre Residents

I am writing to update you on the schoolyard severance issue and the proposed cuts to itinerant music instruction at the TDSB.

School Yard Severance

As you may have seen in the media in November 2012, the TDSB is considering severing portions of school yards and selling them to raise funds to pay for new schools, additions and major renovations. The original motion in November was voted down, but a second motion asking for a report on property severances was passed in December. The report should be coming to the board in May, and would start the process. Schools in Etobicoke, Scarborough, and North York would be disproportionately affected by the severances as they have larger schoolyards than schools in the downtown core. The plan would involve severing and selling schoolyards in different parts of the city until a total of $100 million is raised…

The board is under immense pressure from the Ministry of Education to sever and sell schoolyards in order to raise funds…

Cuts to Itinerant Music Instruction (IMI)

TDSB itinerant music instruction consists of enrichment programs (strings, band and steel pan) and staff development programs (recorder/orff/vocal music ROV) taught by part-time instructors. The enrichment programs are offered to Grades 5 – 8. The staff development program (ROV) is a program that a school applies for, and has it for two years where the instructor works with a maximum of 3 classroom teachers and their students for half a day per week. At the April 8, 2013 Budget Committee meeting, cuts were proposed that included program hour reductions of 24% for Band, 29% for Strings, 19% for Steel Pan, and 100% for all Staff Development programs. This may result in actual job loss for 55 of 107 itinerant music instructors.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Chris Glover – Severing and Selling Schoolyards, Cutting Music Teachers

A 10-Point Program for Education in Toronto
Campaign for Public Education


This Program, including each of the 10 points, are urgently required:
  • to protect Toronto’s publicly financed school system;
  • to maintain a viable education system which functions as an “education model”, rather than as a business model,
  • to prevent privatization in any form, and
  • to give each student what they need to succeed.
Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Campaign for Public Education – 10-Point Program for Education in Toronto

Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability
Elise Houghton


With even a brief look into our environmental predicament we find scientists, environmentalists and social commentators describing our record-size human population’s ‘ecological footprint’ on the planet as nothing short of a crisis. How then, it would seem timely to ask, can schools contribute to involving kids in creative environmental problem solving?

In this article we will explore how local schools can – and indeed already do – play an emerging role in the transition to a healthy, sustainable future. We will highlight some of the many ways that schools – teachers, students and staff – are interacting with parents, community members, organizations and local culture to create “green community hubs.” Through the introduction of environmental programs, projects – and more recently, more extensive partnership-based initiatives – schools are demonstrating their unique capacity to provide hands-on learning, new kinds of community interaction, and models of environmentally sustainable practice.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Elise Houghton – Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability

The Planetary Emergency
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark


Capitalism today is caught in a seemingly endless crisis, with economic stagnation and upheaval circling the globe. But while the world has been fixated on the economic problem, global environmental conditions have been rapidly worsening, confronting humanity with its ultimate crisis: one of long-term survival. The common source of both of these crises resides in the process of capital accumulation. Likewise the common solution is to be sought in a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” going beyond the regime of capital.

It is still possible for humanity to avert what economist Robert Heilbroner once called “ecological Armageddon.” The means for the creation of a just and sustainable world currently exist, and are to be found lying hidden in the growing gap between what could be achieved with the resources already available to us, and what the prevailing social order allows us to accomplish. It is this latent potential for a quite different human metabolism with nature that offers the master-key to a workable ecological exit strategy.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Foster and Clark – The Planetary Emergency

James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy
John Bellamy Foster


Today’s climate science tells us that even aiming at keeping the rise in global temperature below 2°C is extremely risky, since approaching anywhere near 2°C is inviting irreversible change — i.e., a point of no return with the climate-change process spiraling out of human control. According to the National Resource Council, “Climate changes that occur because of carbon dioxide increases are expected to persist for thousands of years.”5 Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, argue that 2°C no longer constitutes the threshold of “dangerous” climate change, as was originally thought by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but rather — in the face of indications of increased climate sensitivity such as a much faster melting of Arctic sea ice than predicted — now stands for the threshold of “extremely dangerous” climate change.

In response to this planetary emergency, 140 nations have agreed, at least in principle, to a goal of staying below the 2°C threshold.7 So far, however, all attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, including the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent climate negotiations, have been a dismal failure. Carbon emissions continue to rise in every part of the world, and notably in those countries that have been most responsible historically for carbon releases: the developed countries. Current climate agreements — mere promises usually based on cap and trade or the creation of a carbon market — have proven ineffective and, would, even if lived up to, take the world well beyond the 2°C boundary. So bankrupt is this general approach, in fact, that James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the world’s foremost climate scientist, has said that these climate agreements are not worth the paper that they are written on, since they will guarantee a disastrous outcome.

Given that it is cumulative carbon emissions that matter, the goal has to be to keep fossil fuels in the ground, not simply to slow their use as in most current strategies. A complete transition away from fossil fuels is necessary within a few decades. The question is how to construct an exit strategy that will accomplish this.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
John Bellamy Foster – Climate Change Exit Strategy
Click HERE to download:
Pablo Neruda – Keeping Quiet
Click HERE to download:
Denise Levertov – Tragic Error

Mentorship Programs: Girls and the Human Responsibility
Alison Gaymes San Vincente


Girls continue to face educational, economic, and social barriers which make them less confident than males, more prone to poverty than males, less likely to work in “male-dominated” professions and more susceptible to gender-based violence. The challenges are deep rooted and I argue that there is an urgency to respond. This article also explores the possibilities that exist when girls in the developed world consciously act in solidarity with even one girl in the developing world. I argue that such conscious support positively impacts those involved and creates an opportunity for societal transformation. It’s the girl effect. This article is broken into two distinct sections, a discussion of gender socialization and an examination of conscious social action. Both sections begin with a story that captures key concepts leading to the need to maintain a focus on girls.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Alison Gaymes San Vincente – Girls and the Human Responsibility

Learning through Mentorship: Accessing Opportunities to support Boys.
Ramon San Vincente


The “Young Lions” is a boys mentorship program that was established for marginalized, middle school boys in an urban school in the northwest of Toronto. This article draws on my experiences as founder and mentor in this program, as well as my experiences as a middle school teacher implementing mentorship pedagogy, to articulate what it means to truly ‘care’ for our boys. The article begins by providing a context for the concerns about boys, and goes on to discuss the opportunities and challenges inherent in mentorship as a method of addressing boys’ underachievement, disengagement and social/emotional wellbeing. I close by providing four considerations for effective mentorship that can assist in establishing or maintaining boys mentorship programs, or considering mentorship as a powerful approach to teaching.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Ramon San Vincente – Accessing Opportunities to support Boys

Testing in Texas
Kari Anne


Can you imagine what would happen if, in Texas alone, the billion dollars that goes to the testing corporation went directly to the schools instead? Can you imagine what children would learn and experience if their schools had the actual resources to teach them? And I don't just mean teaching them to read and write and add and subtract, but teaching them how to think critically, and how to interact in the world, and how to draw conclusions from whole concepts that cross over from reading to writing to adding and subtracting and social studies and physics and everything combined and in between.

"But how would we measure success?" the lawmakers might ask. "How will we know if the teachers and administrators are doing their jobs?" "How will we know that the students know the fundamentals?"

How?

You will know when the world doesn't implode in 30 years. You will know by the leaps in science and engineering. You will know by the future works of art and literature. You will know by the cures for cancer and world hunger. You will know by lowering rates of incarceration. You will know by the plummeting rates of dropouts and teen pregnancy. You will know by future diplomatic successes. By new inventions. By the protection of our own goddamned species.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Kari Anne – Testing in Texas

Look in the Mirror: Just substitute “Canadian” for “American” child care hell
Martha Friendly


… The story of “Jackie’s Daycare” — the child care home in which the tragedy occurred — with its lack of public oversight and unsafe, insalubrious conditions (the home child care in this case was “registered”, with virtually no requirements and monitored not at all, or minimally, at best) reflect the kinds of perilous conditions in some unregulated (sometimes illegal) child care revealed in a CBC Marketplace story only last month. And while Canada has not experienced a child care tragedy on the scale of this one in some time, just in the last two weeks, two child death cases in unregulated child care in Mississauga, ON and Port Coquitlam, BC have come back to the criminal courts, though they have received much less media interest in Canada than the “Jackie’s Daycare” case did in the US…

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Martha Friendly – Look in the Mirror

The Trouble with Course Choices in Ontario High Schools
People for Education


Based on data from all Ontario high schools, the analysis in this report shows strong correlation between students’ family backgrounds, their history of immigration and learning English, or their Aboriginal identity and the chances that students will attend a school with a high percentage of applied students. Unless we assume that wealthier students are inherently more academically capable, this correlation is disturbing, all the more so given the international and Ontario evidence that suggests that taking applied courses itself may not merely reproduce disadvantage, but actively exacerbate the risk of problematic academic outcomes.

This new research shows that it is time to look more closely at who is choosing applied courses, why they are being chosen, what advice parents and students are receiving in grade 8 when the choices must be made, and, ultimately, whether having two versions of any required course leads to some groups of students — particularly students who already experience disadvantage — being further disadvantaged.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
People for Education – The Trouble with Course Choices

Wanted: Captain for a Sinking Ship
Janet Bojti


Since its amalgamation and rebirth as North America’s 4th largest School Board in 1998, the TDSB has experienced a rapid turnover of Directors. For an institution with a 2.5 billion dollar budget, it has shown a remarkable lack of continuity at its helm. To contrast, the current CEOs in the five big Canadian banks have all averaged 10 years tenure in their jobs without any resignations, retirements or dismissals. Six Directors of Education in less than 15 years amounts to a revolving door. It exemplifies the turmoil that has plagued the school board as it lurches from crisis to crisis. Meanwhile the search is on for yet another Director of Education.

Click HERE to download and continue reading:
Janet Bojti – Wanted: Captain for a Sinking Ship

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