Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
I wrote a blog last year about discrimination
in education that reported the results of a study that a colleague and I undertook
to see if British Columbia student teachers discriminated against Aboriginal
learners. We found that pre-service teachers led to believe that students were Aboriginal
were more likely to place them in a remedial program, even though their
performance was identical to students whom they were led to believe were not
Aboriginal.
The designation of special education
categories for distinguishing students with moderate to severe behaviour
disorders and mental illnesses has not resulted in supporting this population
of students with intervention strategies leading to successful high school
completion. Current definitions for students with behaviour disorders and
mental illness in the Special Education Services: Manual of Policies,
Procedures and Guidelines (Ministry of Education, 2016) are subjective, putting
heavy emphasis on the attitudes and opinions of schools and school districts to
determine the status of the students. The vague definitions and subsequent
inconsistent identification is problematic and does little to determine if the
services are focused on the appropriate students (p. 234-235).
Schools separate students into courses or programs according to their perceived ability or interest levels. Students are often encouraged to “choose” a pathway the school thinks will produce successful outcomes for the student. This separation (called tracking or streaming in different places) often finds students over- or under-represented in a stream or track in relation to their overall proportion in the student population. Black students in Toronto streamed into courses below their levels of performance prompted the Ontario Minister of Education to refer to streaming as a "systemic, racist, discriminatory" practice and announce that grade 9 streaming will be eliminated by the 2021-2022 school year in Ontario.
Streaming and tracking occur whenever there are alternatives that appear to be the same but are actually not. Two or three different mathematics courses at the same grade level may not be called streaming, but the separation often provides opportunities to some that are denied to others. The nomenclature used to refer to Ontario’s grade nine mathematics tells the story. One pathway is academic mathematics, a requirement for entrance to most universities; the other is applied mathematics, an alternative to the more rigorous academic pathway.
A factor associate with lower
graduation rates is student mobility. Students who change schools are at
greater risk of not graduating. Schools do not adapt well to students who enter
school once the academic year has begun. It is not that schools are unwelcoming
to the individual. They usually are. The problem is integrating the newcomer
into an existing instructional program. Albeit unintentional, this impediment to
learning most often affects students from low income families among which racialized
and Indigenous Canadians are over represented.
Could institutional racism be one of the reasons that the teaching force does not reflect the demographic variety in the population? It might be difficult for individuals who have seen the subtle and not so subtle racism in the system to work within that system, even if they believed that being part of the system would help to change it. Harold Johnson, author of Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada, was recently asked why, after serving as an Indigenous defense lawyer and prosecutor in Saskatchewan, he believes that having more Indigenous lawyers will not lead to better justice or outcomes for Indigenous offenders and victims. To which he responded:
To get through that education, you have to allow yourself to
be colonized. You have to become one of them. And once you become one of them,
then you’re outside of your own community. If you believe in that system, then
you’re put outside. You’re going to struggle to connect again.
There are numerous structural and operational practices that fail to consider the demographic diversity of the students enrolled in Canadian schools. Many of those structures and practices arose during a period of colonial settlement. Slavery was an approved practice and the extermination and mistreatment of Indigenous people were accepted when colonial institutions, like public schools, were developing.
It took until the late 1960s for Canada to begin to talk about racism. It revised its overtly racist immigration policies and strengthened human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. But the justification for its revision of immigration policy was often discussed in terms of the advantages that diversity would bring to Canada’s economy. Few were willing to speak about racism and consider how it was embedded in all institutions.
Social segregation sometimes occurs without intention. In the return to school this fall, an Ontario school board decided to distribute students to online classes alphabetically. By doing that students were inadvertently grouped by their ethno-linguistic backgrounds. It was some time before the school board learned that it had formed groupings that did not reflect the racially diverse nature of its district. A spokesperson for the board acknowledged the concerns parents had expressed about the groupings but said that reorganizing the classes “would have delayed the start of the school year.” The decision of the board to keep the alphabetical groupings leaves the impression that bureaucratic expediency takes precedence over ensuring diversity.
Canadian society is increasingly willing, even if reluctantly, to talk about racism and consider its impact on its institutions and its population. That is a good thing. But willingness to talk about racism and consider its impact on Canadian education is only a first step in addressing the institutional racism and inequities that are perpetuated.