The More Things Change: Durable Inequalities and New Forms of Segregation in Canadian Public Schools

Abstract

Canadian public education was established in the mid-nineteenth century with the intention of enforcing Victorian values, promoting industry, and securing the integration of new immigrants into the growing settler nation. Today Canada is widely recognized for its apparent success at creating equitable outcomes for its diverse students. Schools across Canada have historically offered an expansive range of programs intended to provide a wide range of choices and cater to student interests. Yet such programs have also been an important mechanism for the production of social and economic inequities. Despite large-scale efforts to address these dynamics, over the last two decades such “programs of choices” have become further entrenched while also obscuring their role in the production of inequality, usually through the rhetoric of choice and market logics. This phenomenon is clearly illustrated in the context of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada’s largest public education system. Analyses of student demographics within the TDSB point to a distinctive trend towards homogeneity within elite as well as lesser socially valued programs. Despite interventions to address systemic inequity, students within specialized arts, gifted, and French immersion programs are disproportionately White and wealthy, while students within special education and trades/skills focused programs continue to be disproportionately racialized and poor. The case of Toronto is an important illustration, given its reputation as a progressive city with a school board that has taken issues of inequality seriously and has attempted to address how formal structures like streaming produce inequality. Using data collected by the TDSB, in this chapter we show how programming policies that ostensibly give students more options to make decisions about their future end up reproducing the same patterns of inequality that have historically plagued and continue to shape urban school districts. We argue that, as educators committed to equity and social justice, our task is not only to reveal such patterns, but to insist on system-wide strategies for addressing inequality that do not shift the onus to students and their families and that recognize how durable inequalities persist even when new strategies are implemented to address how social and cultural context shapes choices as well as outcomes.