Black Habits - Province rules out black-only schools

Professor Carl James, an education expert at York University, says the Toronto District School Board should be experimenting with black-focused schools.

Amid growing local controversy, the Ontario government says racially segregated schools arenâ€™t in the cards.

But it says itâ€™s not ruling out ethnically focused programs that could help black students, and other groups, do better at school.

The controversial topic of alternative schools for black students was raised Wednesday at a forum on black achievement in Torontoâ€™s public school system.

But any decision on using racially focused programs to raise academic achievement rests with the provinceâ€™s new Literacy Secretariat, said a spokesperson for Education Minister Gerard Kennedy.

The secretariat is led by Avis Glaze, a veteran Jamaican-born educator now in charge of a bid to raise standardized test scores in the province.

But the ministry remains cautious on the topic of racially oriented education.

"At this time there are few statistics to suggest academic achievement is based on race or ethnicity," spokesperson Amanda Alvaro said.

Academics said yesterday it may be time to consider experimenting with alternative schools for black students. But the reaction of activists and other observers who waded into the debate ranged from caution to repugnance.

Former lieutenant-governor Lincoln Alexander â€“ who, among other distinctions, has an award for promoting racial harmony named after him â€“ was scathing in his criticism.

"If you donâ€™t have a black boss in the police department, does that mean you canâ€™t be a policeman? If you donâ€™t have a black person as head of the law society, does that mean that you canâ€™t get a law degree?" he said in an interview.

"These university professors ought to get out of their classrooms and see whatâ€™s going on."

But a York University education expert says there is nothing outrageous about the idea of black-targeted schools.

Professor Carl James, who has published numerous books and articles on black students, says the Toronto District School Board should be experimenting with a black-focused school in an existing facility, probably one that already has a majority of black students.

James agrees with George Dei, a sociology professor from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, who sparked the debate this week. He drew loud applause at the town-hall meeting by suggesting alternative schools for black students were the only way to prevent them from being pushed out of the system.

He was one of many at the meeting who believed Toronto schools discriminate against black students with zero-tolerance codes that are being implemented by teachers, few of whom come from the same racial or ethnic background as the children they teach.

The idea of alternative schools for black students has emerged periodically over the last 20 years as educators struggle with ways to improve the academic achievement of some groups.

For many, it raises the spectre of racial segregation in U.S. schools, but James, who was born in the Caribbean and is a former Regent Park youth worker, says itâ€™s not the same thing.

"Do we consider Catholic schools as segregated? No, we think there have been some benefits to them," he said in an interview yesterday at York, where he is the universityâ€™s affirmative action director.

One of the problems with the idea is that nobodyâ€™s ever really thought through what they might look like, James said. Such a school could have black students or a black-focused curriculum, or it could focus on students understanding themselves in terms of race.

Not all activists favour the notion, however. If Canada is truly a diverse society, its schools should reflect that diversity, not fragment it with specialized schools, said Zanana Akande, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.

"We live in an integrated society â€“ at least weâ€™re supposed to â€“ so what we should be doing is make sure schools serve the population thatâ€™s out there," Akande said in an interview.

"But what we do need to do is make sure we integrate black history into the curriculum. Right now, the way we teach World War II, youâ€™d think blacks werenâ€™t there. Youâ€™d think First Nations werenâ€™t there. We have to stop teaching the history of omission we teach right now."

Akande said it might be useful to run a temporary black-focused school as a research project to measure the influence of black instructors and black curriculum on student achievement, "but not as a general program, no."

Akua Benjamin, a black activist who is director of social work at Ryerson University, also sat on the town-hall panel. "We fought streaming back in the 1960s, but it seems weâ€™re still fighting it today," she said.

"The Toronto District School Board has 80 social workers now to deal with 550 schools â€“ thatâ€™s an outrage," she said. "We need more black teachers, more black principals and a plethora of black social workers."

The former Toronto Board of Education stopped collecting race-based statistics with amalgamation in 1997. Since then, it has collected only "student success indicators," which correlate student performance with place of birth. These statistics only capture children born outside Canada.

The student success indicators for 2001-02 showed that 54 per cent of students born in the English-speaking Caribbean had 14 credits or fewer at the end of Grade 10. (Students should have 16 credits at this point in their academic careers. Anything less than 14 is an indicator that these students could fail to complete high school within the next three years.)

The success indicators also found that 45 per cent of students born in west Africa, Central or South America were at risk of not graduating on time, as well as 39 per cent of east African students. Some 27 per cent of Canadian-born students were found to be at risk. Students born in South Asia, Eastern Europe and eastern Asia were less likely to be at risk of failing than those born here.

Toronto Star readers, who posted comments on the newspaperâ€™s online forum, opposed the idea of alternate schools for black children by a lopsided majority.

"How is that going to promote understanding and diversity in the broader community?" wrote Jonathan Leigh of Toronto.

And not all black teens at Wednesdayâ€™s town hall felt they were "at risk" of dropping out.

"Weâ€™re not all struggling; some of us do excellent at school. I was born here, Iâ€™m not struggling, and I found the Grade 10 literacy test was no big deal," said Mark Dennis, 17, a Grade 12 student at Oakwood Collegiate.

Friend Dadrian Brown, also in Grade 12, said some black teens skip class and practise basketball in hopes of landing a sports scholarship, "but they donâ€™t seem to realize you also need marks to get a scholarship."