Rant: it’s not segregation, really. Really. Really.
The Toronto District School Board voted this week to create an “Africentric” school in order to address the fact that black kids drop out in higher numbers than other groups in Toronto.
In case you need a translation, that’s a black school.
Of course they handily ignored that unlike in some areas of the US, “black” in Toronto means: Somalian and Ethiopian refugees (I myself am curious as to whether the refugee kids are most at risk of dropping out, but since they’re being quoted as “black” kids it is hard to tell), Canadians of Carribean and West Indian descent, etc. etc. There is no one “black culture” in Toronto. There is no one “black neighbourhood” in Toronto. Toronto never had a post-slavery ghetto like that.
Our neighbourhoods don’t really work that way, and even where they do, they are small enclaves so that in the schools there tend to be a wide mix. Also although there are poorer/rougher areas of Toronto, they are nothing like in the US. Regent Park (slummy) sits pretty much next to Rosedale (about as snobby & rich as you can get). Having driven through south-east LA and driven though Detroit many times, it’s just not the same.
So… I don’t even know where to begin with this. Why would bussing kids around to get all the black kids as a school with a particular curriculum be a good idea?
At first I thought maybe I should have no opinion, since it does seem to be mostly black parents who are asking for that kind of school and maybe they know best. But then I got really, really angry.
First of all, I bet there ARE problems with the curriculum, so why not change the curriculum across the board? (Replace one of the Orwells with Achebe, really, that would be a good thing.) Why should my kid miss out on black history and culture (and south-east asian, and asian, and and and) because he’s white? (-ish; we have a decent streak of first nations too)
Second, if the problem with “kids who drop out” is that they are in schools where not everyone is like that, what implications does that have across the system? Are we going to set up Indian schools and Cantonese schools and Mandarin schools and Philipino schools and… grr.
But thirdly I just don’t see how this is going to help the kids. I see four potential outcomes:
1. The school will, regardless of how well it is actually doing, game the system to show what a success it is and we will never know
2. The kids that self-select to go there will do well, and it will be called a success, but the reason will be the self-selection
3. The kids that go will be the kids in trouble, or a usual combination of ok and not-ok kids (just meaning academically there) and the stats will either meet or be below board-wide standards
4. The school will be a wild success and then kids from other cultures will want to go there and they will try to gatekeep by race and the Human Rights Commission will come down on them
Mostly my reaction remains: ??!!!???
If the school is in my neighbourhood, which it might well be as we have plenty of black kids here, I’d be tempted to send Noah, except I don’t really intend to use him as a political statement err, ever in his life.
But mostly I am so sad. What the hell? Just What. the. hell.
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I’m similarly perplexed. I just heard a CBC radio piece with the message “the Africentric school alone isn’t enough” and then they interviewed someone at a church after-school center where kids go to do their homework and get school help. That neighborhood lowered their drop-out rate from 50% to 10% because, as the woman said “If you are doing well in school you feel more engaged.”
So, yeah, if the more “sensitive” curriculum or better role models helps, that’s great. But we need to build community supports for all kids having trouble, not just the few who get lotteried into this one new school. I went to a talk on children/poverty many years ago, where the speaker said, we don’t need research, we don’t need innovation. We have proven models. We just need to spend the money to implement them widely.
Instead we get tax cuts.