Toronto school board sets higher improvement targets for students based on race, sexual orientation

2014/10/07 2 Comments

The value of data to inform educators and support communities and groups that are not doing as well as most:

Cecil Roach is the York board’s superintendent of equity and engagement and a strong champion of collecting data.

“The things that are important are the things we measure, and you need to know who your students are. You cannot fully talk about supporting students unless you’re able to peel back the onion in order to see the inequities.

“You have some folks who say, ‘I don’t want to segregate kids by social identity,’ but that’s ridiculous,” said Roach. “We already know gay kids are more prone to suicide, but a lot of our knowledge is anecdotal. We need to know who our students are.”

York University education professor Carl James is such a believer in the value of gathering student data he has created a network of school board officials from Toronto, Peel, York Region and Ottawa to study the issue.

He would like to see Premier Kathleen Wynne call for a “learning gap strategy” like the one she requested this week to close the wage gap between men and women, and for this, surveys would be key.

“Such data would yield very rich information for the province,” said James, “and I would argue it would be of tremendous social and economic benefit.”

A spokesperson for Education Minister Liz Sandals said Friday her government is committed to have school boards “regularly use high-quality data and ongoing research to measure progress and guide programming,” especially after the scrapping of Ottawa’s long-form census, but “it is too early to tell what that will look like.”

But detailed surveys won’t be easy. A fierce split erupted this spring among Toronto’s Somali parents when the TDSB survey showed Somali students have a 25 per cent dropout rate, 10 points higher than the board average. While some Somali parents welcomed the information and joined a task force to examine solutions, others called it unfair labelling.

“These numbers can lead to uncomfortable conversations, especially about race and also sexual orientation,” admitted Spyropoulos, “but they’re conversations we need to have.”

As I go through the NHS data on educational outcomes, some clear and uncomfortable gaps in outcomes for some communities. Again, the conversations may be uncomfortable but silence and ignorance won’t help improve outcomes.

Toronto school board sets higher improvement targets for students based on race, sexual orientation | Toronto Star.

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When it comes to recruiting foreign students, Canada earns F for effort

2014/06/19 Leave a comment

On the lack of an effective international education strategy. Removal of credit for pre-permanent residency time in the new Citizenship Act is another disincentive compared to other countries (believe UK, Australia and other countries provide):

“Canada seems to think of education as a really crude export industry and we look at it in a really mercantilist fashion, where we want more people to come in and we don’t really care if people go out or not,” says Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates based in Toronto.

Jennifer Jeffs, president of the Canadian International Council, says international education should be part of Canada’s foreign policy strategy. As a tool of “soft diplomacy,” encouraging students to go abroad, where they form meaningful relationships, would improve foreign relations and Canada’s reputation.

While Canada may not have the highest standard of education and research or the most competitive fees, it still has an unmatched reputation as a tolerant, multicultural and safe society, which it should capitalize on.

“The overriding concern is that Canada is not getting as much as it deserves from international education,” says Simon. “All the building blocks are there to make Canada a real powerhouse in international education, and yet it hasn’t happened.”

When it comes to recruiting foreign students, Canada earns F for effort.

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U.K. to teach students ‘British values’ after ‘Trojan horse’ scandal reveals Islamists taking over schools

2014/06/13 1 Comment

More on the Birmingham schools issue and debates in the UK:

Inspectors said members of governing boards had promoted a “narrow faith-based ideology” at some schools, whose students were overwhelmingly from Muslim backgrounds. One school attempted to ban mixed-sex swimming lessons; at another, music lessons were dropped because they were considered un-Islamic, and at a third, board members vetted the script for a nativity play and told staff they could not use a doll to represent the baby Jesus.

“Staff and some head teachers variously described feeling ‘intimidated,’ ‘undermined’ or ‘bullied’ by governors, and sometimes by senior staff, into making changes they did not support,” Mr. Wilshaw said.

Park View Educational Trust, which runs three of the criticized schools, rejected the inspectors’ verdict and said it would launch a legal challenge. Vice chairman David Hughes said the inspectors “came to our schools looking for extremism” but had not found any.

The Muslim Council of Britain said it was concerned that the inspectors were conflating religious belief and extremism.

It said in a statement that “extremism will not be confronted if Muslims and their religious practices are considered as, at best, contrary to the values of this country, and at worst, seen as ‘the swamp’ that feeds extremism.”

U.K. to teach students ‘British values’ after ‘Trojan horse’ scandal reveals Islamists taking over schools

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Should Toronto’s schools speak one cultural language, or many? | Toronto Star

2014/04/08 Leave a comment

The usual debate over targeted vs general programming. It starts with having information regarding which communities are struggling, and then developing appropriate supports. When such programs complement regular school programming, these can address the problems while not “ghettoizing”. Separate schools for ethnic and other groups, on the other hand, do not foster integration.

Canada’s award-winning mentoring program Pathways to Education has helped wrestle dropout rates to the ground in 15 of the country’s poorest communities by offering scholarships, tutoring and mentoring to entire neighborhoods — not the ethnic groups within them, said Vivian Prokop, president of Pathways Canada. Still, she noted there are different challenges when working with new immigrants, with aboriginal students and with home-grown “generational poverty.”

“The barriers to education vary based on a child’s postal code, and we don’t want to label or segregate students into ethnic groups,” said Prokop. “We offer wraparound supports — deep intervention — to the whole community.”

Jo-Ann Davis, the chair of Toronto’s Catholic board, believes you can serve specific groups without fuelling stereotypes. “We want kids to do well, and I believe cultural background is very important and has to be honoured. “We’re trying to bring those voices to the centre of the conversation, even though the practices will be different.”

Professor Carl James, who teaches urban diversity at York University’s faculty of education, said he’s not worried about giving extra help to certain ethnic groups as long as they don’t forget they’re part of a larger society.

“It might build the confidence and knowledge needed to feel more comfortable going into the larger community,” he said. “Whatever we are as a country is a combination of all of us.”

Should Toronto’s schools speak one cultural language, or many? | Toronto Star.

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It’s Somali vs Somali at TDSB | Opinion

2014/01/24 Leave a comment

Tarek Fatah on the divisions within the Somali Canadian community over whether special programs or enrichment needed to address the poor educational outcomes of some in the community. Not surprisingly, the community is divided, but this also reflects a maturing to have active and diverse debate and participation. We also had debates within government over whether we should “target” or focus on specific communities with specific issues, and I would make a distinction between specific programs  and separate schools for a community:

Liibaan Moalin, a father of three children in the TDSB system, started an on-line petition addressed to Chris Bolton, Chair of the TDSB and Premier Kathleen Wynne, asking, them to “Stop Ghettoizing Canadian Children of Somali descent.” The petition, which already has over 500 signatories, says:

“We are parents of Canadian children of Somali descent who find the idea of the proposed TDSB-funded “Somali Task Force” extremely offensive and racist. We believe if such a program is implemented, an entire community that is already part of a marginalized group, will further be stigmatized and segregated from the mainstream Canadian community.”

School Superintendent Jim Spyropoulos of TDSB, who is spearheading the “Somali Task Force” proposal acknowledges, “Labelling and stigma are an issue,” but told me, “it’s the Somali-Canadian community that is insisting on having the label ‘Somali’ attached to the taskforce.

“We met with hundreds of Somali-Canadians at meetings held in the Abu-Hurraira Mosque and the IMO Islamic Centre in Rexdale,” he said.

It’s Somali vs Somali at TDSB | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun.

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Quebec: Education charter chill

2013/12/07 Leave a comment

An in-depth piece on recent history of Quebec headgear debates, starting with efforts, under then Education Minister Marois to open up, and concluding with PM Marois’s current focus on the Charter, proposed reversing some of that opening.

Speaking the day after the head of the Quebec women’s federation was booed and heckled at a discussion at Université du Québec à Montréal, McAndrew said the debate is bringing out the worst in Quebec society. She added that it also might encourage teachers to dismiss any efforts to adapt to students of diverse ethnic backgrounds — in the way they teach their history course, for example — or accept different eating habits, or have patience with parents who haven’t mastered French.

“We are encouraging people to say OK we’re done with being open to different religions, but also to different cultures and languages, especially given the early ambiguity of the charter of ‘values’ before coming back to ‘laïcité’ (secularism) and the attitude that we must ‘put our pants on’ to deal with immigrants. …

“There’s so much tension and so much aggression,” McAndrew said. “It’s very worrisome. Will we feel it in the schools? I won’t say this is the end of our openness to pluralism, but we’re taking two steps backward for one step forward. And there are so many other things we should be working on in the schools for both the majority and the minority students.”

Education charter chill.

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Un cours d’histoire trop «orienté» au goût des profs | Le Devoir

2013/11/30 Leave a comment

Debate over the consultation document for Quebec’s high school history course. Written too much for the teachers, not the students. Some of the debate seems like typical debates between experts, not terribly profound.

Un cours d’histoire trop «orienté» au goût des profs | Le Devoir.

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