Archive for ‘Demographics’

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May 31, 2009

Key factors associated with youth delinquency

A Statistics Canada analysis this spring looked at factors associated with delinquent activity among immigrant youth in Canada. Ostensibly, the report was comparing newcomer and Canadian-born youth, but what it found was more about the importance of family and friends.

The report on property-related and violent activities relied on self-reports from the 2006 International Youth Survey.

Youth were asked if they had participated in a series of risky behaviours in the previous 12 months:

  • Property delinquency was measured as youth who had damaged something on purpose (including bus shelter, window or seat), stolen a bicycle or vehicle, stolen from a store, burglary and arson
  • Violent delinquency was measured whether a youth had snatched a purse or bag, carried a weapon, threatened someone with harm, participated in a fight intentionally.

Here’s what the report found:

Rates of both property and violent delinquency vary by generational status within Canada. Native-born youth reported the highest rates of property-related delinquency, while youth who had immigrated to Canada after the age of 5 reported the lowest rates. However, factors other than generational status were found to account for differences across generational groups in rates of property-related and violent delinquency.

Having delinquent peers has the strongest effect on all youth in terms of explaining rates of self-reported delinquency. The odds of reporting property delinquency were more than three and a half times higher for youth who had delinquent peers than for those who did not. Youth who reported having peers involved in delinquent activities were almost three times more likely, as those without, to report violent delinquency.

Relationships with family also play an important role. Youth who reported a good relationship with their mother were less likely to report violent delinquency.

Youth who spent the majority of their time with friends were also more likely to report property  and/or violent delinquency. Youth who were isolated from family or friends reported higher levels of property delinquency.

If youth reporting being a victim, they also were more likely to be involved in delinquent behaviour. Those who had experienced a theft were more likely to report property-related delinquency. They were also more likely, along with those who reported having been hit violently, to report violent delinquent acts.

Finally, schools play a role as well. Youth who aspired to university were less likely to report either type of property or violent activities while youth who skipped school were more likely to do so. Youth who felt that their school was ‘unsafe’ were also more likely to report having committed acts of violent delinquency.

In sum, protective factors for youth included aspirations for university and spending time with family and/or close relationship with mothers. (Recent immigrants were most likely to enjoy these conditions, and therefore were least likely to be involved in delinquent behaviours. Stereotypes, be damned!)

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Posted in Blog menu, Demographics, Diversity, Neighbourhoods, Youth | 1 Comment »

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May 28, 2009

The strength of EDI as a predictive tool

I am probably about to commit heresy: I hate the EDI.

The EDI, in long form the Early Development Instrument, has gained popularity as a population tool to rank students’ readiness for school. Developed by Dan Offord and Magdelena Janus at McMaster University, and popularized by Clyde Hertzman at the University of British Columbia, the EDI has been shown to have a strong correlation to the likelihood of a student cohort to achieve academically. But more tellingly, it strongly correlates to students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the neighbourhoods where they live.

The EDI tool is administered in Senior Kindergarten by classroom teachers in the space of about fifteen minutes per student. To quote, students are assessed on five domains:

  • Physical Health and Well-being referring to physical readiness for the school day, physical independence, and gross and fine motor skills.
  • Social Knowledge and Competence referring to overall social competence, responsibility and respect, approaches to learning and readiness to explore new things.
  • Emotional Health and Maturity referring to prosocial and helping behaviours, anxious and fearful behaviour, aggressive behaviour and hyperactivity and inattention.
  • Language and Cognitive Development referring to basic and advanced literacy skills, interest in literacy/numeracy and memory, and basic numeracy skills.
  • Communication Skills & General Knowledge referring to the child’s ability to communicate needs and idea effectively and interest in the surrounding world.

In each of these domains, children who come from tougher economic circumstances or from outside the dominant linguistic or ethnoracial group are invariably disadvantaged. For instance, whether a child arrives to school with appropriate clothing, can discuss an idea, or knows her way around a picture book are all EDI measures. Low EDI scores are often, though not always, evidence of deprivation.

Children who start from further behind also face a higher hurdle, if they are to measure up to their peers. A different framework would  measure the improvements children may have made; instead the EDI uses a threshold to measure a child’s readiness for school. You make the cut-off or you’re at-risk.

The strengths that marginalized students might bring to the classroom, but which fall outside the scope of the the framework for “school readiness,” are also not recognized in the same weighty way. Internal resiliency in the face of a strange school setting doesn’t get measured.

(My favourite example of this was when the girl from across the street who spoke English as a second language began kindergarten with my daughter, she relied on my daughter to repeat the teacher’s instructions slowly. Then, in the afternoon, when they both attended Heritage language classes, they reversed roles. It was a creative coping strategy.)

Finally, I hate the the EDI because it can act as a proxy for teachers’ middle class prejudices and ethnocultural biases. However, therein also lies its strength.

Not surprisingly, groups of students who do poorly in academic rankings in Kindergarten generally continue to do poorly in the eyes of their teachers in higher grades. Teachers are at least consistent.

Like Robert Fulgham’s Kindergarten Poem, all your school really needs to know is how you did in kindergarten. If your Kindergarten teacher thought you were unruly and inattentive, then probably so will subsequent ones.

Research has shown that the EDI is a reliable predictor of children’s likelihood of completing school successfully. We can tell that early on who might not make it.

The EDI’s predictive ability is sad confirmation of the social gap that some identifiable demographic groups come from further behind and stay behind throughout their schooling.

Yet, there is hope. Hertzman’s work, with the school system in British Columbia, shows that a coordinated, community-based response can make a difference in the school readiness of all children. So, that is where our work begins.

Posted in Demographics, Inequality, Mapping, Neighbourhoods, Public Education, Social Capital | Leave a Comment »

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April 6, 2009

Ontario School Information Finder

In a bid to improve access to information and individual school accountability, the provincial Ministry of Education made a big misstep. This week, it introduced the Ontario School Information Finder which allows parents (and others so inclined) to comparison shop between shoes, er, schools.

Parents can find schools by name, or even more easily, by typing in their postal codes into the search engine. Then adding additional schools to their shopping cart, school bags, they can select three, hit the “Compare the Schools I selected” button and see how each school compares to the others in two domains: student achievement (as measured by provincial testing) and student demographics (including percentage of students from low income families, recent immigrant families, families with a university level-education and students receiving special education).

“What’s the objection to parents knowing this information?”, a reporter asked me today.

No objection. Parents already have access to this information. It is publicly available through the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, probably the most famously, but also through individual school profiles published by school boards, real estate agents, Toronto Life, and even a school board trustee.

However, the problem is the way the Ministry has packaged the data on student achievement and student demographics, as if it were a meaningful measure of a school. Learning the number of immigrants at a school, or the number of low-income kids, only tells you about the “input.” It doesn’t tell you how good the students are and it doesn’t tell you how good the school is, how much learning goes on there. However, it’s very likely that the Ministry website will be used to shop between schools.

When parents choose a school for their child, provincial test scores are probably one of the least reliable measures of a good school (and was part of the reason so many parents resisted the introduction of the EQAO). To be bald, provincial test scores correlate highly (although not absolutely) with student demographics, as the TDSB’s recent work on its Learning Opportunity Index attests. So, if parents choose a school by its test scores, they will likely be choosing a school where wealthier students attend rather than a school where great learning is happening.

Well, maybe peers are important. Higher income kids are three times more likely to go to university then kids in the bottom 10% of income (TDSB report). Isn’t that a good influence? It may be, but there are other considerations.

Social mix strengthens an important civic function of public education. We learn to get along with each other there. Students who attend more homogeneous schools learn alot less about others who are different from them – and, frankly, this is already a problem that occurs in many of Toronto’s schools, as Professor David Hulchanski’s work on the sorting of neighbourhoods by income has shown. A tool like this will accelerate this segregation. (And it is segregation; parents I spoke to in a focus group last year in one upper income neighbourhood worried that their kids only see people of colour at the local corner store and that their kids will not understand diversity in any real or granular sense when they move out of their enclave.)

Given the choice, parents acts for the benefit of their own child, as they should; so if “good” schools are defined, uncritically, as the ones with higher test scores, poor kids will be left further behind. Poor kids will be left further behind because they have fewer options, whether it’s bus fare to travel to “better” schools or parents who know how to hunt through the system. Left unfettered, two streams will emerge: elite schools and “bad” schools.

In a bid to give parents greater free choice, to ensure their own family’s gain, the Ministry has created a tool that gives free rein to individual license without considering our common good. What we will see is greater inequality, and it sounds all too familiar in these economic times.

The common good, the idea that a social mix strengthens us all, is even part of the calculation.

People for Education has been quick off the mark on this one, posting an open letter to the Premier, because the Ministry website undercuts the very foundation of a strong public education system. Parents and educators are signing up in droves to endorse the letter.

So, what should parents want to know when selecting a school?

  1. Is the principal an excellent educational leader?
  2. How well do teachers connect to the community? to each other? to the students?
  3. How happy are other parents with the school?
  4. Is the school a small enough size that people know each other and big enough to allow some diversity?
  5. How welcoming is the school culture?
  6. What additional supports are available to students?
  7. What sort of improvement do students make when they attend the school, i.e. what is the value-added?

School visits will give you that information.So what if you wanted to build a web tool which might work?

Rate My teacher is a website that lets students get at some of these issues, even if it is focused at individual teachers. Perhaps a more useful website would have been one that let parents connect with each other, to share their experience and learn from each other.

Suggestions like this are often met by fear (and anyone who has ever read the anonymous comments left on a newspaper website has some reason for this fear). However a moderated forum or a wiki format would achieve the same school-level accountability and transparency that the Ministry was trying to achieve and have provided more meaningful information for parents looking to learn more about their local schools.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, when Ontarians are polled about the performance of schools in OISE’s biannual survey, the happiest people in the system are usually those closest to the the school system, that is parents. And parents are most likely to be happy about their own school and although they may worried about other schools. A Wiki page for each school would allow parents to build a shared vision of the strength of their local school. A Web 2.0 approach would have been a much better model. We may get there.

Posted in Demographics, Inequality, Neighbourhoods, Public Education | 2 Comments »

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March 30, 2009

What is Middle Class?

The coupon clippers at Red Flag Deals had a year long debate, worthy of a sociology class, on the definition of middle class. In an extended thread, they hashed out appropriate income ranges, lifestyles and purchasing power.

It’s one of the harder questions to answer in a country like Canada where most of us see ourselves as middle class.

The “middle class” are receiving a lot of focus these days as the economy worsens. So who are we?

Earlier this week, on TVO’s The Agenda, economist Armine Yalnizyan laid out what a middle class family in Canada looks like. It lined up fairly closely to the Red:

  • You own a home, rather than rent it – this has a significant effect on your ability to accumulate wealth.
  • You can save enough to send children to after-school activities and/or post-secondary education.
  • You can save enough for retirement.
  • You can take vacations occasionally.

In advance of the Good Jobs Summit last November, Jim Stanford and Hugh MacKenzie looked at what a middle class income, or living wage, would be in Toronto. Their report for the CCPA estimates that, in a two parent family with two children, each adult, working full-time, year-round, would have to earn $16.60 an hour each for a net family income of $57,400. A single parent of one child would require a similar hourly wage ($16.15). (All this casting a different light on Premier McGuinty’s recent speculation about delaying a hike in the minimum wage.)

To find out how your family income compares to most other Canadian families, take a look at the Growing Gap’s income calculator. Adjusting for family size, it allows you to see where you sit within the range of incomes in Canada.

A final note, The Economist recently reported on a study which showed that more people in the developing world are middle-class than ever before, although, it reports, researchers  wrestled with the definition of middle class as well.

Posted in Demographics, Income | Leave a Comment »

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March 2, 2009

School board releases new Learning Opportunity Index

UPDATE: The 2011 LOI has now been released. 

The voting is done. After delayed consideration and hold-out votes from a few trustees, the Toronto District School Board’s new Learning Opportunity Index (LOI) was adopted a few weeks ago. TDSB staff set to number crunching with the new variables, and today released the 2009 elementary and secondary school LOI index.

This measure of student need across the system drives some resource allocation to those highest on the Index, and so was the subject of some discomfort amongst trustees who worried “their” school would be losing resources with the re-calculation. But, as explained in another post, this index is stronger, much stronger.

The school board’s own student census of high school students and parent census of elementary students demonstrated growing income inequality. So a tool like the LOI is a remedial effort to even the odds for students. Poor students who attend poor schools do poorly because they have less. Even when the local community pulls together, bake sales and other fundraisers raise less money than one in a school with richer families. The LOI is a necessary system response to this inequality.

The strongest variable in the new LOI is the one which measures the numbers of families on social assistance. Why this is so is just speculation, at this point, but early suggestions include the variable acting as a proxy for long-term and generational poverty or for deep poverty (those on Social Assistance are well below the Low Income Measure).

The neediest school in the city lies in the junction between the 401 and Black Creek Drive, surrounded by industrial lands. Students walk through the neighbourhood bungalows from the nearby residential towers. The other most needy schools are found where we expected them, around traditional low-income areas such as Regent Park and the Jane-Finch/Black Creek neighbourhoods. Others are in or near some of the City’s Priority Neighbourhood Areas, in Scarborough, along Kingston Road or near the Lawrence Heights community. And schools which are near large Toronto Community Housing (TCHC) projects or areas with poorer housing are also popping up in the new LOI. The elementary schools with the least challenge sit, north of Rosedale, in Moore Park and Lawrence Park.

The neediest high schools are located near Jane-Finch and in Weston-Mt. Dennis, others are schools with specialized support programs or located along subway lines for easy access. The richest are near situated in or near the Lawrence Park and Leaside neighbourhoods.

Frequently Asked Questions have been attached to the new Index, further explaining its structure and use.

Staff are now turning to the harder question left to them by trustees: How do students race and ethnocultural identities affect their educational opportunities?

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Posted in Demographics, Inequality, Public Education | 2 Comments »

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February 13, 2009

Ethnic enclaves in Toronto, 2001 – 2006

A packed house gathered last week at the Joint Centre for Excellence on Research in Immigration and Settlement. Building on their earlier work on ethnic enclaves in Toronto, professors Mohammed Qadeer (from Queen’s) and Sandeep Kumar Agrawal (from Ryerson) were speaking about the residential patterns of seven ethnic populations in Toronto:  African Blacks, Caribbean, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Portuguese, and South Asian. (These are as reported at the census tract level by individual respondents to the 2001 and 2006 censuses living in the census metropolitan area (CMA) of Toronto.)

While the maps in their PDF presentation were the most interesting, Qadeer and Agrawal also laid out a few key elements about “ethnic enclaves”:

  • Enclaves are defined as residential concentrations with supporting cultural institutions and services.
  • Enclaves are distinct from ghettos because they happen through a positive choice, rather than a lack of choice. Measuring this, however, is a challenge.
  • Enclaves are an important step for Canadian newcomers on the way to settlement and integration.

Using GIS analysis, Qadeer and Agrawal’s found that ethnic enclaves are extending (so that they are now more widespread) and consolidating (single ethnic groups were more likely to be a higher portion of a neighbourhood). This growth, they found, was often spurred by new immigration.

However, they also found a wide variation in the likelihood of people of various ethnic groups to live within their own neighbourhoods, and that no enclaves were exclusive. All city census tracts had some ethnic mix.

The study provokes further questions to explore, many which were asked that afternoon. Further research could be done to look at these trends over a wider range of years and among other Canadian geographies or at alternate geographic levels (dissemination areas instead of census tract). Also worthwhile would be a examination of the shifting residential patterns of the City’s largest ethnic group, those of British ancestry, and, and more compelling, whether there is a tipping point when “white flight” becomes a reality.

Finally, the study gave a quick look at the percentage growths among various ethnic groups; Russian and Ukrainian populations grew the most quickly. The largest groups are British, South Asian, and, then, Chinese. (For more a detailed description, see the City of Toronto’s 2006 census broad overview and the profiles of specific ethnic groups.)

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Posted in Demographics, Diversity, Mapping, Neighbourhoods | 3 Comments »

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February 8, 2009

Toronto's Disappearing Middle Class

For those of you who missed Sunday’s Toronto Star article with maps,  The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization, 1970 -2000 is being updated by authors, David Hulchanski, with Richard Maaren, at University of Toronto. Their recent update brings us to 2005, and the 2006 Census data will be included by the research team later this year.

What the maps show is not a shifting middle class, as described by the Star headline, but a disappearing middle class. Toronto has become a city of growing inequality. Fewer and fewer areas of the city are “middle class,” defined at close to the average individual income of $40,000 in 2005. Areas of high income are remaining essentially stable geographically, concentrated in the middle of the City and along the Lake, while low income areas are consolidating where they were previously and spreading out through the suburbs.

Posted in Demographics, Inequality, Neighbourhoods | 2 Comments »

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February 4, 2009

The TDSB's Learning Opportunity Index

Tonight the trustees of the Toronto District School Board will be looking at revisions (and here) to the Learning Opportunity Index, a measure which ranks schools according to the needs of their students and then focuses resources on the most needy ones. (The final rankings are available here.)

I had the pleasure over the past eighteen months in helping to revise and improve it, so I have two arguments to make:  first, why the LOI is an important, and essentially Canadian, educational tool, and second, why this new version is an improvement.

The purpose of the Index is to support students who are falling behind in school because of challenges they face outside of school. This new Index will allow scarce school resources to be driven to those most in need, those who are facing some of the greatest barriers to academic achievement and who are, by our measures, doing poorly in school.

The LOI deserves continued support because:

  • Our Canadian ideal of public education is to allow every student a fair chance to participate in our broader society. To do this, we have to make sure every child has a good start. Because the effects of poverty are cumulative, building exponentially, poor kids in poor schools face the largest learning barriers.
  • This is a best investment of educational dollars. Investments in poor kids make a bigger improvement than investments in kids in other income brackets – they just have more room to grow.
  • The LOI is and has always been one of the most cutting-edge educational measures in North America, mimicked in other jurisdictions, because of its statistical validity and reliability. It does the job it’s supposed to do: leveling the playing field.

The proposal going forward to the school board tonight should be supported because it shows an even stronger relationship between external challenges and academic achievement. The revisions should be supported because they:

  1. strengthen measures of poverty
    The current LOI measures income, looking at average and median incomes in the neighbourhoods where students live. These measure the middle of the pack. However educational research shows that low income is one of the main drivers of poor academic performance.

    • The proposed LOI keeps median income, for stability and consistency, but strengthens the measure of low income, adding
    • the percentage of Families who fall below Statistics Canada’s Low Income Measure (those living with incomes that are less than half the median Canadian income, i.e. those who are in the bottom quarter of income earners), and
    • includes, for the first time, a measure of families receiving social assistance.
  2. eliminate variables which confuse the issue
    Variables with a weaker correlation to academic performance were dropped; the new LOI is better able to predict how students would perform academically.

In recent years, housing type has become a poor variable because of problems of under-reporting and because no distinction is made by Statistics Canada between high-rise rental apartments and condominiums. Housing type no longer shows a strong correlation to academic performance.

Immigration is also a poor predictor of how students will perform. For instance, students from some areas of the world outperform students from other parts of the world, including students who are Canadian born. So, immigration status alone does not accurately predict academic problems.

The removal of immigration and housing type will mean that school located in areas with high immigration and multiple story dwellings may not be as high on the LOI if those income levels are not comparable to other parts of the city. However, when we looked at the academic performance of these same schools, we found they were performing more closely to the level predicted by the revised LOI. In actuality, the LOI is now a more accurate predictor of those students’ academic potential.

Some critics have also raised the issue of race as one variable that is missing from the proposed LOI. Educational research shows this can also be a factor in academic achievement because it is a substitute measure for racism. (i.e. one’s race does not predict one’s academic potential, but it does predict the barriers to academic achievement). Even though I chaired the school board’s equity advisory committee for a number of years, I feel comfortable with leaving the variable of Race aside for the moment for two reasons. First, the Board is being asked to make a public commitment to look at the variable of race when Toronto data is available, and I believe this should and will be done. Second, and sadly, because visible minority status and low income are so closely correlated in Toronto, that by strengthening the poverty measures, the proposed LOI captures many of the same students that a race variable would. In effect, race is currently a fair proxy for poverty, and so the strengthened poverty measures capture many of these same populations.

In another post, I will explain the mechanics of the LOI that make it work so well.

(Update on the TDSB’s LOI, after its release: Belonging Community: School board releases new Learning Opportunity Index)

Posted in Demographics, Diversity, Inequality, Neighbourhoods, Public Education, Youth | 4 Comments »

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February 1, 2009

Local school reviews: the problem of declining enrollment, pt. 2

So, if school enrollments are dropping across the country, what are some of the emerging solutions?

As I mentioned in my last post, our local grade school, one which has stood in the east end of the city for more than one hundred years, is facing an accommodation review. As its enrollment has been dropping over the past decade, like the majority of Canadian school, it’s not much of a surprise. (For more on this trend of declining enrollments, see People for Education’s special report published last spring. Full disclosure: I worked with this great group of parent activists for years.)

However, what’s different now, compared to the panic of ten years ago, is that the school board review is not simply about how to close this neighbourhood school. The proposed solutions are far more creative:

First, recognizing the trend a few years ago, the school began to hunt for magnet programs, which could boost enrollment. French Immersion was rejected as an option (on account of the perhaps-stereotypical image of idling SUVs ferrying children from nearby wealthy neighbourhoods), but the school council has recently been exploring housing an alternative school.

Second, the school board has agreed, through the accommodation review, that students  attending the local school can stay at the school until grade 8, thereby increasing the number of students inside its walls.

A cynic (or someone with a long memory) will rightly point out that this is only an option because Design & Tech  and Home Ec. programs have essentially been eradicated from Senior Schools (grades 7/8).  Dedicated, specialized classroom space was de-funded during the Harris years, and most schools cut these programs. Ergo, grade 7/8 schooling can now be delivered in any general classroom. In sum, there is no longer any reason to ship kids away to bigger, more specialized schools at the end of grade 6. So why do it?

There is a real upside to this decision though; that is, that it minimizes the number of shifts students face within a short scope of years (at the ends of grades 6 and 8). Keeping students at their local schools means they can maintain the social relations they have built over years.

One of the best studies to demonstrate the importance of strong relationships in building the resiliency of children and youth was done two years ago by Resiliency Canada, Toronto Public Health and Doorsteps Neighbourhood Services, called A Community Fit for Children and Youth. Children and youth in this age group who felt connected to their families, their schools and their communities were the least likely to participate in risky behaviour. Yet at the age of twelve or thirteen (just as they were leaving grade six and entering grade seven), they were also beginning to  feel disconnected from these same supports. Part of the challenge from the reports’ recommendations was to families, educators and communities was to examine how to maintain these important connections.

I learned this on a deeply personal level,  one day, when my son was still in grade school, he and I began to talk about the people that he knew in our neighbourhood. It began as an idle question, but soon, gifted souls that we are, we began to make a list of everyone he knew. By the time we got to one hundred people, we stopped, exhausted and awed at the strength of these visible ties he had to our community. Those sorts of social connections need to fostered, and our local school review may just provide the opportunity to do that.


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January 26, 2009

Local school reviews: The problem of declining enrollment, pt. 1

Our local school is undergoing a Local Accommodation Review, one of those bureaucratic phrases which raises the specter of school closings. It’s the sort of thing, not long ago, during the Harris years, which would have brought parents out in swarms.  It passed nearly unnoticed last week at a school board sub-committee meeting.

Of course, there are fewer of us to notice now. When my high-school-aged daughter started school there, enrollment was twice what it is now.

Neighbourhood demographics have shifted, and homes which housed one or more families in apartments now house singles, childless couples or smaller families. Babies are still being born into the neighbourhood, however our homes are now considered “starter” homes, with a large homes in the neighbourhood have three bedrooms. By the time the babies are ready for school, new siblings have arrived, and families move away.

Most schools around the province are seeing declining enrollments. Birthrates are down everywhere. The only schools left with portables are “receiver” communities, where Canadian newcomers are settling or where new (and bigger) housing is being built.

Declining enrollment continues to hurt the idea of neighbourhood schools. The Liberals have yet to substantially change the funding formula, which is still driven by the number of students enrolled in a school board.

Year over year,  school boards have had to continue to cut back as their revenues dropped, even while some of their costs remained the same or grown: fixed costs such as a full-time secretary or janitor or rising costs such as energy and maintenance of older buildings. And it has meant that school are undergoing Local Accommodation Reviews.

What this calls for is creativity and the willingness to look at new ways of managing these resources which sit at the centre of every city neighbourhood. But perhaps what it also means is that government, school boards and communities will demonstrate a willingness to take some risks to preserve the idea of local schools.

More on these solutions to come….

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