Institutional Racism and Inequality in Canadian Schools: Part 2 of 3

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

We speak about whether children are “ready for school.” This often means that we expect children entering school to know their colours, letters, and numbers, and can arrange objects in a prescribed order. These abilities are the foundation for much of what they will learn in school. We expect that most children entering school will be school-ready and assume that the children who are not manifest deficiencies that will need to be addressed. We often assume that children from specific sub-groups in the population are less likely to be school ready.

We could consider entry to school from another perspective. We should ask: are schools ready for the range of children for whom they will be responsible? Other related questions are: what strengths do children entering school possess upon which the school can build? How might we recognize and validate the knowledge that students do bring to school?

I do not dispute the desirability of children learning their colours, letters, and numbers and being able to arrange objects in a prescribed order. But, taking the perspective of school readiness, we should plan that some children will not have learned those skills prior to coming to school, but also expect that those children almost certainly will know and be able to do things that other children do not know and cannot do.

Recognizing and validating a broader range of knowledge does several important things. It says that what you know and can do is important here. You should be proud of what you know and can do. As almost every teacher knows, children who believe they are successful are more persistent learners because they recognize that they have already learned things of value. Students’ expectations about their own success also influence learning. Having been successful learning in the past engenders confidence in learning things that are new to them.

The children who are ready for school in the conventional sense will learn that the knowledge they posses is not the only knowledge. They will see that there is a broad range of knowledge recognized and valued by the institution. True education is leading people (or learners) out from what they know to master things they do not know.. Those children will be less likely to stigmatize children who do not have the same skills at school-entry because the institution values the knowledge that all their peers bring to school.

Now, here is the tricky part. Schools cannot be content to simply recognize and validate the knowledge some children have and continue to prize the knowledge children who are ready for school possess. There is no question that those skills are important, but they are not the only valuable skills. The following anecdote illustrates the impact of false assumptions and one of the many skills people have that are not recognized in school.

On a trip with my spouse and friends, I was persuaded to go white-water rafting, an activity I would normally avoid. We assembled at the designated place and a young woman asked us to sign a release. After we read and signed the forms, she introduced herself as our guide. I did not expect that, imagining she would pass us along to her father. We boarded the raft. She gave a safety briefing and asked, “any questions?” I said, “this is my first time white-water rafting” and asked, “how old are you?” “16,” she replied, “but don’t worry I have been guiding since I was 12. I’ve made hundreds, maybe thousands of runs with newbies, and have never lost one.” At the time I was focused on my survival, but, in retrospect, was embarrassed about the assumptions I made about white-water rafting with a 16-year-old female. Moreover, it is illustrative of knowledge that people possess that is not typically recognized and valued in school.

Assumptions like mine are baked into the structure and practices of our schools, and into the perceptions about the students and families they are supposed to serve. The assumptions we teachers make influence how we teach and, in turn, the performance and the assessment of performance of the students for whom we are responsible.

Institutional Racism and Inequality in Canadian Schools: Part 1 of 3

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Trustees in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to make completion of an Ethnic Studies class a high school graduation requirement by the 2023-2024 school year. In addition to the course requirement, the motion approved by the School District made the Superintendent of Schools responsible for ensuring support for educators to integrate Ethnic Studies into the Pre-K to Grade 8 curriculum. 

The decision will affect many students.  LAUSD, the second largest school district in the United States, serves more than 600,000 students, about the same number of students as attend public schools in British Columbia or maybe a few more.

The trustee who introduced the motion said “. . . recent protests calling for equality across the nation have shown us the value in education in dismantling institutionalized racism and inequity.” She also said, “The majority of the students we serve in L.A. Unified are Black and Latino, and it’s important for them to learn about their history and see themselves reflected in our curricula.”

There is much to applaud in the decision of LAUSD. Infusing the curriculum with what LAUSD calls ethnic studies will ensure that the subject matter becomes part of the course of study rather than an add-on. In assigning responsibility to the Superintendent for ensuring teachers have the needed support sends a signal. Educators need assistance in learning how to teach about the history and contributions of the groups who have suffered from institutionalized racism and inequity. It is one thing to include a body of material in the curriculum, but something entirely different when it comes to teaching about it without perpetuating racist stereotypes and stigmatizing the people whose history and accomplishments are being taught.

One could ask why a special motion is necessary to ensure the inclusion of this material? Why is it not already part of the curriculum being taught today? The answer is racism, the institutional exclusion, marginalization, and denigration of the groups whose history and contributions are now to be included.

There is one place I disagree with Kelly Gonez, the trustee who introduced the motion. Part of her argument was that it was important for students to learn about their history and see themselves in the curricula because Black and Latino students comprised a majority of the students in the district. I disagree. Even if there were no Latino or Black students in the district, it would be important to include knowledge of the history and contributions of Latinos and Blacks. The knowledge is important not because of their physical presence but because excluding it makes students less well educated and more likely to perpetuate institutional racism and inequality.

I raise this California initiative in my blog, which is principally about Canada, because the curricula in Canadian school jurisdictions largely ignores the history and contributions of Indigenous people and their systematic mistreatment by settlers. When Indigenous people and people of colour are included in the curriculum, they are represented in a superficial way that stereotypes them and makes them seem foreign or exotic. The exclusion and misrepresentation are manifestations of the institutional racism that pervades Canadian education.

I think referring to “ethnic studies” is also a manifestation of unconscious institutional racism. Gonez and her colleagues want to draw attention to groups that have been excluded – particularly Latino and Black Americans. But the term ethnic has negative connotation. At worst it is often taken to mean racial, tribal, or folkloric. At best, it is taken to mean cultural.

Using the term ethnic, as Gonez does, unintentionally implies that there are traits or cultural practices that are the essence of the people to whom the term is applied. This inadvertently ignores the diversity among the individuals who may choose to identify with the group to which reference is being made.

Speaking about curricular inclusion requires serious, continuing, and difficult conversations that are just getting started in the Canadian context. But eliminating institutionalized racism does not begin and end with curricular inclusion. There are other features of the system that need to be addressed. From school entry to graduation, there are structures, practices, and assumptions that need examination and change. 

British Columbia’s educational advantage is eroding

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

During the summer I was interviewed by an international panel that was studying British Columbia’s education system. The panel was trying to determine if high performing jurisdictions such as British Columbia shared common characteristics that helped to account for that high performance.

There were two major questions to which the panel sought answers. The first question was: why has British Columbia performed at a high level internationally and how did the province accomplish this?

I divided my answer into two categories: social factors and education system factors. I chose those categories because most of the differences in student achievement can be attributed to social factors. About 70% of the difference in student performance is affected by social factors and about 30% to education-system factors.

On the social side, I said that, in comparison with most countries, Canada exhibits high social equity. For example, there is less income inequality in Canada than in the United States. Canada has roughly 70% of the income inequality of the US. Or to state it another way, inequality in the US is about 30% greater than in Canada.

Although there are persistent inequalities between men and women, there is greater social equity for Canadian women than in many other countries. At the negative extreme, in some countries females are denied education and have very restricted opportunities.

Selective immigration is a factor in social equity. In polite discussion, people say that Canada skims the cream from other countries, accepting migrants with significant educational, social, cultural, and economic capital. A more pejorative description for Canada’s immigration policy is “asset stripping.”

Canada possesses a social safety net that helps to reduce more radical inequalities. Our health system is one example of the services provided to Canadians that in other countries is much more restricted. Parenting leave, employment insurance, and old age security are others.

Another social equity factor is a balance between individual and group rights. Over time, Canada has developed what I describe as a social justice infrastructure that has contributed to social equity. While it is by no means perfect, that infrastructure includes human rights legislation, immigration reform and control, employment equity, anti-racism and multicultural initiatives, and acknowledgement of the mistreatment of Japanese, Chinese, and, more recently, Indigenous Canadians.

The second set of factors that has helped students in British Columbia to achieve comparatively high levels of performance in education can be attributed to the education system. Before describing the features of the system that have made a significant contribution, I should point out that I am taking the long view because I think that there have been challenges to those features in the past decade or so. To put it bluntly, many of the factors that contributed to high performance in the past have been eroded or eliminated.

For much of BC’s history the education system has benefitted from a strong ministry of education staffed by individuals with knowledge of teaching and learning. That pattern has been less true for the past two decades and much of the expectation of leadership has been devolved to the district level. However, capacity at the school district level is not uniform across the 60 public school boards in British Columbia. In the absence of a strong Ministry capable of providing expert guidance, some districts, and the students for whom they are responsible, suffer.

British Columbia once had a strong, detailed curriculum and curriculum support upon which teachers could depend. A common curriculum and common, provincially approved resources provided a foundation for teaching. Recent revisions to the curriculum, with its emphasis on big ideas and the diminution of subject-specific knowledge, provide less support for teachers.

About twenty years ago, the Ministry produced performance standards for numeracy, literacy, and social responsibility. Those performance standards set out grade-level expectations for student performance and, most important, gathered, and published samples of student work that fell below, met, or exceeded the standards. This was enormously useful to teachers because it helped guide professional judgment about grade-level expectations and provided them with example that they could use with students and parents to talk about the standards.

Another of the factors that contributed to student performance was formal, provincial assessments. The assessments were typically administered at the senior secondary level to ensure common outcomes, certify that achievement standards had been met, and determine eligibility for provincial scholarships. The scores on those tests were factored into the student’s final grade by weighting the provincial examination score and the score assigned by the teacher based on the teacher’s classroom assessments. Those provincial assessments are largely no longer administered.

BC once employed school accreditation, a practice that sought to encourage the members of a school to engage in self-study, to set goals for improvement and the means for achieving them, and to monitor progress toward the goals established over time. Although there was provision for external evaluation, the primary benefit of school accreditation was the self-study component.

School accreditation sought to inculcate among educators an ethic of self-regulation rather than externally imposed regulation. But, teachers’ union opposition to school accreditation diminished its potential as a means of collective self-study and self-improvement and reinforced the impression that teachers are disinterested – if not opposed – to improvement. BC no longer uses school accreditation.

A strength of the BC system is its comparatively well-educated and well-prepared cadre of teachers. The post-war improvement in teacher education helped to improve student performance but that trend has stalled in the past 30 or so years. There are many things that a teacher must know and be able to do to promote student success. They need subject-specific pedagogical knowledge, the ability to manage the classroom and student behaviour, and contextual awareness and understanding of their students. The amount of time devoted to preparation in these areas has eroded in the past 30 years.

A factor in British Columbia’s success relative to other countries is that, for the most part, the learning environments across BC schools are similar in the way that they influence student performance in core subjects. In technical terms, the proportion of between-school difference on PISA is around one-tenth of the OECD average. Provincial, rather than local, funding of education and an allocation model that considers cost differences among school boards are two factors that help to produce similarity in learning environments.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that British Columbia is fortunate that these conditions are present to a greater degree in BC than jurisdictions where these two factors are less well developed. However, as other jurisdictions improve, British Columbia’s status among school jurisdictions will diminish.

Yet, I am not particularly concerned with British Columbia’s performance in comparison to other countries or provinces. Schooling is not a horse race. I am concerned about British Columbia’s performance in the future in comparison to its current performance. The future I  foresee is not so rosy: the diminution of a common curriculum (big ideas without underlying consideration of the evidence in support of them are like headlines without the story); the fragmentation of prior knowledge; and a decline in conceptual and procedural knowledge that PSE and employers ‘count’ upon when a student earns high school graduation.

I am mindful that “things are not like they used to be and never were.”  In other words, the past was not as rosy as one might infer from what I have written. There were and are significant gaps among groups of students. Several exogenous factors prevented better performance. Poverty and racism are among the most potent of those factors.

I am worried about increasing inequities. The income gap is growing, inter-group hostility appears to be on the rise, COVID-19 has revealed holes in the social safety net, but more specifically COVID-19 has also revealed inequities in educational opportunities that more advantaged parents and guardians can provide their children that less advantaged ones cannot. These are troubling developments and over the long run will likely detract from the positive record of student performance in BC.

COVID-19 magnifies long-standing tendencies

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Last week, a teacher turned broadcaster asked me if I would reflect on Failing Our Kids: How we Are Ruining Our Public Schools, a book I wrote in 2003. He was interested in the extent to which my appraisal had changed in the intervening years.

Most of what I wrote in 2003 is unfortunately applicable in 2020. COVID-19 has acted like the steroids that some body builders use, helping to define and magnify the themes and tendencies.

It would be an understatement to say that COVID-19 has sparked public – and especially parental – anxieties about public schooling. The media tap the vein of anxiety swollen by COVID and social media, far more powerful today than in 2003, have amplified those anxieties and injected significant misinformation.

Some elected representatives have traditionally manipulated public anxieties about education for political and ideological advantage. Some have misrepresented the data about the successes of public schooling as well as its shortcomings. During COVID-19, most have sought to deflect parental anxieties about the response to the pandemic to local boards of education.

A lack of provincially coordinated responses to COVID and the deflection of attention to local school boards have played into the hands of those politicians eager to abandon public schooling in favour of a market-driven private system. They would thus rid the public purse of the burden of preparing the next generation of Canadians. But even where there is no such political agenda, lack of coordination and deflection of responsibility will encourage some to abandon public schools.

Teacher unions have often exploited parental anxiety to improve their working conditions and membership by overdramatizing the impact to changes in education. Though the concerns of teacher unions about the welfare of their members is genuine, their public expression of those concerns is likely a contributing factor to parental anxiety about, and some flight from, public schools.

Canadian parents fuel anxiety about public schooling, their own and the anxieties of other parents. They hold competing and sometimes incompatible ideas and demands about public schools. This is particularly evident during COVID-19. Some parents demand that schools operate as they did prior to COVID, but with precautions to minimize the pandemic’s impact. Others demand online instruction of the same quality as can be achieved face-to-face. Others seek a blended approach, but one that is easily coordinated with parental responsibilities.

In the meantime, public schools are struggling to respond to the extraordinary demands that COVID-19 has imposed. The response has been uneven and imperfect. That should surprise no one. When we describe something like COVID-19 as novel and unprecedented, we must temper our expectations.  That is not to say that we should have no expectations, but the expectations we hold should be reasonable. So, what is reasonable?

Schools and school boards vary significantly in their capacity. They would benefit from greater coordination from provincial ministries of education. This will require more than the production of guidelines. Online learning is in most jurisdictions in a sorry state, but provincial – if not pan-Canadian – coordination and cooperation would improve its quality dramatically. Regulations about the uniform and open reporting of COVID cases by school would likely provide some comfort to the anxieties of parents.

Teacher unions and parents should try to look beyond the horizon of their own interests to work for the common good. One cannot address an extraordinary event by maintaining past practices. There will inevitably be some dislocation for everyone.

Employers and unions will need to modify, albeit temporarily, existing contracts to allow for different staff deployment. I am not suggesting abandonment of the existing contracts but some time-limited accommodations.

By way of illustration, it seems unreasonable to me to expect that teachers who are largely unfamiliar with online learning should be assigned those responsibilities. Those teachers who are conversant and comfortable with the kind of performance online learning demands should undertake the responsibility for developing units, lessons, and modules. The development of the material should be coordinated by the teacher specialists most familiar with the contents of the provincial curriculum. The material should be able to be accessed by classroom teachers from a provincial repository to fit their own timetables. They should be able to create a schedule for the students for whom they are responsible and complement the pre-recorded on-line modules with opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning and receive assistance in the form of small group, and individual, tutorials.

As I hope I have made clear, there are places where I think things need to be better coordinated. However, I think it is important for everyone to cut everyone else some slack at this difficult time.