Education Action: Toronto

The schools can’t run without us. Every school has at least three or four of us. Some schools may have fifty of us and we outnumber the teachers. When you think of someone who works in a school, the first person that jumps to mind probably isn’t a caretaker, secretary, bus driver or education assistant.

Monty Neill worked at FairTest in Boston for more than 20 years, “striving to change the types and uses of standardized testing in the public schools of the United States.” His paper here deals with testing and evaluation in the U.S., what he calls “another undesirable ‘gift’ from the U.S. to the rest of the world.”

This began as a paper delivered at the Red-SEPA/IDEA conference, Mexico City, February 18-20, 2009, and has subsequently been expanded and developed by the author.

In February 2009 the Toronto District School Board changed its policy to allow increased corporate sponsorship of various school activities. While this might seem to be a relatively minor change in policy, it is in fact a sea-change in relations between schools and commercial interests, with long term implications for the kind of education that will be experienced by kids, teachers and parents.

What follows is the first draft of Education Action: Toronto’s response to the School Community Advisory Panel’s final report on school safety for the Toronto District School Board. The panel was chaired by civil rights lawyer Julian Falconer. Its report is entitled The Road to Health, and was published in January 2008. The report can be found in its complete form at School Safety Panel

We hope you will find the time to criticize this response to Falconer and add your suggestions for improving it. You can reach us at eatoronto@yahoo.com.

This first draft was done quickly in order to bring our concerns into the discussion going on around Falconer’s recommendations. This discussion is still in its earliest stages. We don’t pretend to have the last word on what the most effective response should be. We really need your help to get it right. Indeed, parts of our response are not complete, as you will see, and await further discussion and contributions from people like yourselves.

We hope you will find the time to criticize this response to Falconer and add your suggestions for improving it.

The Toronto District School Board has just cut somewhere in the
neighbourhood of $30 million from its 2009-2010 operating budget.
The savagery of these cuts is primarily the result of a flawed
provincial funding formula introduced by Mike Harris and continued in
its essentials by Dalton McGuinty. In these notes, Hugh Mackenzie
outlines just how destructive this formula has been, especially for
large urban boards like the TDSB. He also proposes some key principles
which must govern the TDSB respond to this funding crisis.

Education Action: Toronto has been a solid supporter of the development of an Africentric school at the Toronto District School Board. Two articles that follow – African-Centred Schools: Not Segregation, but a Path to Survival by Murphy Browne and Making the case for Africentric Education in Toronto by Grace-Edward Galabuzi — provide many of the arguments that have led to our support.

What follows are excerpts from Murphy Browne’s columns in Share
Newspaper – from November 2007 to June 2008 – which deal with the
question of African-centred schools. Murphy Browne is an African Heritage
Instructor, community activist and columnist with Share, writing about the
history, culture and concerns of Africans on the continent and in the
Diaspora. She can be reached at tiakoma@aol.com

by Fowzia Mahamed
In the year 1993, our family moved to Jamestown, in Etobicoke North – a low-income, metro-housing, inner-city community. It is one of the three targeted at-risk communities under the Mayor’s Neighborhood Action Plan for its high crime rate, shootings, killings, poverty, desperation, desperation, gangs—the list is endless. Jamestown is also a place where the bottom streaming of its children, including my brothers and sisters, is very real and apparent to us all.

by George Martell

The main headline of the Saturday Star (February 28, 2009) read “Toronto School Survey: Race, poverty matter as early as Grade 3.” No question about it. Race and poverty matter a lot in our schools. In fact, they matter a lot more than this survey suggests and a good deal earlier than Grade 3.

An anti-racist curriculum and culture starts with the insistence that all our children be treated as full human beings – deserving our love and respect and the promise of a future with dignity and purpose. It is this perspective that has to be central to how we deal with the curriculum and how we evaluate it, how we fund and run our schools, and how we deal with the various social class and racial divisions our children face at school.