May 30, 2010

An agreed-upon description of poverty

When older women on the Isle of Mann were polled as to whether dressing gowns are a basic life necessity, their agreement was nearly unanimous. If someone who couldn’t afford a housecoat, they were poor. However when young men were asked the same question, their response unsurprisingly was almost the mirror opposite. À chaque son goût?

Defining poverty is a difficult task for government statisticians and policy wonks, never mind the rest of us.

Two of the best thinkers on the topic, Richard Shillington and John Stapleton, recently published a Metcalf Foundation-funded paper, Cutting through the Fog: Why is it so hard to make sense of poverty measures? In clear language, they explain how some basic assumptions shape how poverty is defined in Canada. Therefore, because each definition of poverty leads to different policy resolutions, the authors conclude that, without an agreed upon definition of poverty line, Canadians will continue to be stymied in our actions to solve poverty.

Over the course of the past two years, taking a leaf from the British and European work on social exclusion, Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank took a stab at improving our income-based definitions of poverty. Together with Caledon Institute for Social Policy, they built an Ontario Deprivation Index, and then, piloted it with Statistics Canada through the Labour Force Survey.

The new index developed a common list of ten items which are most likely to distinguish the poor from the non-poor. The work now stands as a key part of the Ontario government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. The first provincial report was released last December and found that one in eight children live in a deprived situation. By its own reports, the government is committed to lowering this number.

The Ontario Deprivation Index will let us know if we have made a difference.

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May 11, 2010

Stealing our lunch money from poor kids

I write this cautiously because it is not my preference to call people out on their actions or the values they hold. Still this is an election year, and candidates must be prepared stand on their record.

But I hope to find common ground here, as well.

This week, the Toronto public school board trustees on the Program and School Services Committee had a chance to do the right thing. They didn’t.

Asked by the Inner City Advisory Committee (ICAC) to commit more resources to the poorest students, they balked.

The motion from ICAC, a formal body of the Board, calls for a higher proportion of the provincial Learning Opportunity Grant (LOG) to be committed to the poorest students and the poorest schools in the Board.

The ask was small, compared to what is transferred from the province through the LOG. ICAC’s motion sought a commitment that 22% of the LOG (just over one out of every $5 of the grant) actually be spent on our most vulnerable students. The range of targeted programs extends for several paragraphs in the motion.

Among two of the lead objectors, Trustees Josh Matlow and Micheal Coteau asked, what would happen to all the other students, those who weren’t poor if these funds were so committed? Indeed, Trustee Chris Bolton had made similar seemingly petty objections when the Learning Opportunity Index was revised, after it turned out that schools within his own ward would not receive as many additional resources because they were no longer identified as among the neediest. It reminds me of the old snackfood ad where one hunter asks another for a potato chip. The happy muncher huffs, “If I give one to you I will have to give one to everyone,”  waving his hand over the tundra. It’s a liberal logic I struggle to understand.

To be fair, Trustee Campbell also chose to vote against the ICAC/LOG motion, citing, instead, worries about the three-year financial commitment, and even Trustee Dandy questioned how the needs of poor students in middle class schools would be addressed (but she voted for the motion after all).

And the motion failed. (While a few friends gave me a long list of reasons for the political nuances among the trustees, it’s hard not to notice that the issue split along gender lines: Cathy and Maria (and Sheila who couldn’t vote) ranged against Michael, Josh, John and Chris (who also couldn’t vote). )

But if I work it through, Trustees Matlow, Coteau, and Bolton were reacting eminently reasonably, within a ward-based election system. And, it is too easy an answer to dismiss their views as the short-sighted or parochial actions of small-time politicians.

For, in at least two previous years (2007, 2009), the full Board has voted to protect funding to students in its poorest schools. This is a fight that parents and activists have fought in every budget round since the early 1990s, alongside their trustees.

The ICAC motion was felled because, in its current state, the LOG has a terrible shortcoming. (See More below for a description of the LOG.) The LOG is “unsweatered,” that is it may be spent as the Board chooses. So, in actuality, only a small undetermined percentage of the funds reach the students for whom it is targeted. It is an exact parallel to the situation Social Planning Toronto found in its 2005 report when it looked at how ESL funds were spent (or not) on English as a second language learners. Instead, the Board uses these funding streams to cover other financial gaps, such as the rising costs of heating and teachers’ salaries.

In sum, school trustees across the province are left with the narrow choice of funding the vulnerable or balancing the budget – something they are required to do by law. Another set of TDSB trustees will face this same hard dilemma again this week when the ICAC motion is likely to be raised at the Board’s budget and AFA committee meetings.

So, agreed, there is no malfeasance in the actions of Trustees Matlow, Coteau and the others. They are striving valiantly to meet their legal obligations.

But the school board’s trustees have gotten snookered by the provincial Ministry.

The Ontario government gets a lot of mileage out of saying that is has dedicated increasing millions of dollars to poor and marginalized kids through the LOG and other poverty reduction strategies. The funds are handed over to other orders of government (municipal and schools boards) to be used for this great good. Fabulous P.R.

The Ontario government wants every student to have a quality education. Some students need additional help from their school in order to do their best.

The Learning Opportunities Grant provides funding to school boards to help students who may be at greater risk of not achieving their educational goals.

And so, then, school board and trustees are left to do the dirty work, to pinch the money from wherever they can, to make up for provincial funding shortfalls.

As Mel Hurtig’s book described the dilemma of poverty, should the Board “pay the rent or feed the children?” Should the Board run programs for poor kids or keep the lights on in the building?

But this is a discussion about some who have and some who don’t. It’s time we stopped stealing our lunch money from poor kids.

The evidence, the economics and the politics all line up behind the value of investing in poor kids. As I argued in earlier posts on the Learning Opportunity Index, doing so brings greater returns even than in students from middle or high-income families. And where there is concentrated poverty, a greater investment is required and greater learnings emerge.

A large body of research supports this. At the local level, TDSB’s recent evaluation of its own Inner City Model Schools show students’ being streamed out of special education classes and academic grades rising a full grade point, at even the worst school. The additional funds TDSB trustees provided proved the power of investing in kids.

So, yes, spending the LOG on the use for which it is given may well hurt other kids and the broader school system. Salaries do have to be paid, buildings heated. And, yes, higher income parents may pick up and move out their children of a divested public school system. These are real dangers that the trustees must consider.

But that is a vision with little faith in the Canadian ideal of fair play. I believe we are better than that, that we will agree to share the pain, to instead make other hard choices, to agree to do the right thing.

I believe we can demand a school system that doesn’t require we poach off the poorest among us. In this, our values must trump our accounting.

Declaration of conflicts of interest:

1) I am a former co-chair of the Inner City Advisory Committee from which the motion came.

2) I have agreed to act as Chief Finance Officer for the incumbent trustee in my ward, Cathy Dandy.

I based this post partly on my remarks to the Program and School Services Committee on the evening of Wednesday May, 2010.

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May 9, 2010

East end history re-discovered

Three delightful pieces of history collected on the recent Jane’s Walks in the Greenwood Coxwell Corridor (Little India) worth posting:

1. Footage of a soccer game in 1930s at the Ulster stadium, formerly located east of Greenwood and south of Gerrard St. East:

The Toronto Ulster United versus the Rangers.

Apparently the stadium was behind the Ulster Arms (nicknamed the Empty Arms by locals), for about 20 years and torn down after the war to build housing. There had been a football field and dog racing track too.

This picture from the Toronto Archives of 1940s Leslieville shows a racetrack along the very eastern edge of the photography, which is Highfield. (Dundas Avenue has not yet been extended through the neighbourhood, and a dirt path crosses what is now Greenwood Park.)

2. Denny Manchee collected this story from local historian, Joanne Doucette. Jane Farrow passed it on:

In the 1880s, real estate developers started marketing tiny lots 10 ft. wide to very poor people. The Ashbridges family owned the west side of Craven Road, which was still farmland, but the east side became this string of shacks called Shacktown. The developer was the same company that created Parkdale. Shacktown had the reputation of Regent Park did – drinking, guns, drugs. The shacks had no running water, no toilets, no police or fire protection, no schools.

Inevitably, people got sick from lack of sanitation (some died), so in 1909 the City took over that area and insisted people install running water. Many couldn’t afford it so they were evicted. Houses were condemned by the health authority and about half the people were turfed out. The fence was part of the cost the City had to pay when it expropriated a good portion of the west side to the street. It was erected to keep the riffraff away from the wealthier folk on the west. The street was named (rebranded!) Craven Road in 1923.

Joanne is a font of local lore and does a lot of guided walks for both the Toronto Field Naturalists and Lost Rivers.

3. The flat-roofed homes on the corner of Walpole and Woodfield Avenue were some of the first ones built in the neighbourhood and now house the fourth generation of the same family. The current residents explained that when their ancestors settled in the neighbourhood, the two brothers dug a hole in the ground, put sod over the top and stayed there until their homes were ready. Farm fields lay to the east, and Natives who worked the fields, lived in teepees to the west. They built many other homes in the neighbourhood, as well.

Also, the City of Toronto Archives has posted historic photos of Leslieville on Flicker.

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April 24, 2010

My beautiful laundromat, grocer, library…

While some espouse the merits of a clothesline, I like laundromats. Stories about them stick in my mind.

Early British suffragettes did some of their best community organizing in the town laundries, away from the strong pitching arms of visiting farm boys who lobbed rotten produce at them when the women stood on the back of wagons at village markets calling for the vote. Describing this scene in her autobiography, Hannah Mitchell, a working class suffragette, explained how community laundries were invariably a safer space where they had a legitimate right to gather.

Or, there is the kindergarten teacher who could not convince local families to visit the school. So she took a pile of books to the nearby residential building’s laundromat, sat down on a stool and began reading out loud. Drawn in, the children loved this reprieve from their long, dull waits, and families began to trust her. It’s a technique well-recognized in community development circles.

Even Jane Jacobs reflected this lesson in her critique of the “tower-in-a-park” style of public housing, according to author Alice Sparberg Alexiou. In a speech at Harvard University in 1956, Jacobs described the basement laundromats as the “heart” of the buildings, the only adult social area, lying in the bowels of the buildings. Laundry rooms are one of the few spaces with the buildings where tenants have any sort of extended contact.

Laundromats are fundamentally social places – third places, according to sociologist – places, outside our homes and workplaces, where we meet each other.

According to the New York Times, laundromats are becoming scarcer, as are many local businesses.

E.B. White once described the elements of his mid-century New York city neighbourhood:

no matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar, a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen, a flower shop, an undertaker’s parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drug store, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.

It was this commercial chaos which inspired Jane Jacobs, soon afterwards.

Jacobs joined the board of the Union Settlement Association, a New York neighbourhood house, after seeing the good work it did documenting the shifts in East Harlem as housing projects were introduced. One of Union Settlement’s social workers, Ellen Lurie, documented the effects in detail.

Lurie described the effect of the disappearance of local stores which had been razed,

Shopping, which was a time in which neighbours met, now is a long, impersonal, tiring business, especially with children in tow. (Alexiou, Jane Jacobs Urban Visionary, 2006 — a great book)

Canadian research is showing how, since the 1970s, grocery stores have been growing larger and more dispersed with urban environments, and because of restrictive covenants are not returning to urban neighbourhoods. We now have to go further to bigger stores to buy our food among strangers.

There is push-back. The call for walkable neighbourhoods has focused on these dynamics. Chris Smith, for instance, cleverly describes his 5-, 10- and 20- minute neighbourhood in Portland Oregon. Green Changemakers offers tips regularly on “living responsibly.” The American Institute of Architects is even bringing this design sensibility to offices and seniors’ housing.

A walkable neighbourhood ensures two important ingredients of a strong community:

  • access to service, especially to those among us who cannot range far, such as seniors, families with young children, and low-income people, and
  • strengthened social connections which allow us to work together for a common good.

If, as Lewis Mumford said of suburbia, it is “a collective effort to lead a private life,” an urban neighbourhood is impoverished without its laundromats, coffee shops, corner stores, public libraries and other spaces where we meet each other.

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April 11, 2010

Community Partnership Strategy: Neighbourhood Well-being Index

(Updates – July 1, 2011: The NWI is has been re-branded and launched as Wellbeing Toronto. July 29, 2010: This should now be referred to as the Neighbourhood Well-being Indices. Revised by the City researchers.)

Statistics and geography is about to get a whole lot more fun in the City of Toronto. City staff are working to create interactive, flash maps which allow users to explore neighbourhood-level indicators.

This fresh concept of a way to measure the vitality of a neighbourhood has now evolved into a first draft of the Neighbourhood Well-being Index (NWI). The NWI will collect neighbourhood-level information from a broad range of sources, including Statistics Canada demographic data and the City’s own administrative databases.

The NWI  is a new and separate initiative from City of Toronto staff, but it dovetails neatly with Council’s newly adopted Community Partnership Strategy, providing the broad evidence base for the strategy. The NWI also complements the move towards open data initiative, OpenTO, acting as an open data warehouse.

Some of the data to be mapped data is already available, in less friendly formats, through the City’s neighbourhood profiles, the Community Social Data Strategy and TO iMapit. The NWI will enable users to identify key populations groups or services of interest and then produce a user-friendly map of the data.

Several good examples from the U.S.A. give a preview of what the NWI might look like:

  • The New York City website Envisioning Development Toolkit is a friendly tool which compares neighbourhood rent and incomes.
  • California’s Healthy City is a more data-rich site which allows users to map local services and demographics.
  • The Reinvestment Fund’s Policy Map compares a range of data across numerous American cities.

In a sophisticated web-based interface, Toronto residents will be able to select the indicators and identify their own “priority neighbourhoods,” a shift from the current Priority Neighbourhood Areas that were selected using more universal indicators which don’t always match specific local priorities. Service-providers for youth or newcomers or seniors will able to identify the highest need neighbourhoods for each of their own populations.

Two overarching data clusters will be used as measures of a neighbourhood’s wellbeing, allowing a more granular examination of Toronto neighbourhoods. These are

  • Population Characteristics, such as Age, Gender, Language, Ethnicity, Family structure, Income.
  • Human Service Infrastructures, from and about Community Centres, Libraries, Parks, Police Stations, Schools, etc.

The NWI’s ten domains and particular indicators will likely expand as additional neighbourhood-level data becomes available. The first draft is exploring the following areas:

  • Arts, Culture and Heritage: Agency Funding & Grants; Community programs; Neighbourhood-permitted events
  • Civic Engagement and Social Inclusion: Agency Funding & Grants; City Beautification Initiatives; Community Meeting Spaces; Donations; Volunteerism; Voter Participation
  • Economic Security: 211 Calls for Service; Child Care; Community-based Services; Debt Load (excluding mortgages); Local Neighbourhood Employment; Long-term Employment; Social Assistance; Unemployment; Variety of Local Businesses; Wages & Benefits.
  • Education: Community-based Services; Early Development Instrument (EDI); High School Students applications to college/university; High School Drop-out Rates; High School Students passing Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT); Library Circulations
  • Environment: Open Space; Pollution/Toxic sites; Soil conditions
  • Housing: social housing waiting lists; property taxes; affordability (sales); adequacy (standards); rooming houses; Streets-to-Homes placements; Long-term Home Care Services survey; Toronto Community Housing tenant profiles; Homelessness & Hidden Homeless; 211 calls for information; and community based services.
  • Recreation and Leisure: Participants and drop-ins users of parks and recreation programs; waiting lists; facilities capacities
  • Safety: By-law inspections/Standards complaints [although these tend to rise with the income of a neighbourhood]; Calls for EMS; Community-based Services; Crime by major categories; Domestic Violence; Fire Code inspections; Firearms shootings and victims; Fires & Arsons; Grow Ops; Pedestrian & Cyclist Collisions & Injuries; Toronto Community Housing Safety and Incidents;
  • Transportation: Commuting; Public Transit Access; Wheel Trans Use; Traffic volumes. [One potential but unnoted measures is walkability]
  • Personal and Community Health: Birth Outcomes; Communicable Diseases; Community-based Services; Vulnerable Children (with data from Children’s Aids Societies)

Reviewers, both academic and from the community sector, are being asked to review the indicators, help identify priorities for the roll-out, and advise in the creation of an index for each domain.

The hope is that the NWI will be ready to launch in the next 16 – 18 months.

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April 1, 2010

Social spaces of apartment-dwelling children

Vertical Living Kids, a new report out of Melbourne, Australia, got a lot of international media play today. Researchers Dana Mizrachi and (former Montrealer) Dr. Carolyn Whitzman look at how children living in apartment buildings interact with their surrounding environment. Mizrachi and Whitzman pursued this question because, like most urban apartment buildings, these homes were not designed with children in mind.

The preliminary report focuses on forty children, aged 8-12, living in public and private market apartment buildings over three stories tall. Children’s excursions were tracked using GPS devises, travel diaries and surveys of parents. Mimicking Photovoice methodologies, the children also used cameras over the course of a week to document parts of their neighbourhoods which they liked and disliked.

The children described their sense of ownership of public space, their comfort travelling across neighbourhoods and using public transit. Children in private and public housing showed some parallels (social natures of excursions) and some differences (range and proximity of areas visited). The researchers found all the children raised “legitimate concerns about amenity and maintenance” of these spaces.

More than half of the children in public housing complained about quality of the play areas, yet none felt comfortable enough to range further. For instance, the report describes

None of the 13 children we interviewed in Carlton housing estate walk 500 metres to Carlton Gardens, with its large and new adventure playground and the Melbourne Museum, both of which are free to children. Instead, they cluster in the rather tired playground equipment on their public housing estates and play in the leftover spaces between residential buildings.

In contrast, children in private market housing were more likely to list greater access to a broader range of play spaces, including pools, tennis courts, skate parks, commercial enterprises, and public libraries. Those who live further from school were more likely to feel isolated from their immediate neighbourhood and so, perhaps, were more likely to travel.

One of the principal findings of the study was how children viewed dedicated/designated play areas: for many of them, the attraction of these spaces is the presence of other children rather than the equipment provided. Playgrounds, playing fields and such places are primarily social spaces for children, and the authors recommend, rather than being hived off from the broader community, should be designed as such.

Mizrachi and Whitzman’s study is particularly relevant to Toronto urban planning for two reasons: One-third of our city population live in such apartment buildings and, two, the critique of many newly-built condominiums that are not child-friendly.

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March 26, 2010

TDSB ARCs may push out the poor

Recommendations from the Toronto District School Board’s ten Area Review Committees (ARCs) are beginning to emerge, and some communities are looking at school closures.

When the TDSB set out to evaluate “which locations should be closed, consolidated or upgraded,” some wondered how equitably this would all play out in the course of these difficult conversations.

Were the schools in poor areas being singled out first?

Parents in some Toronto communities said so. Reporters poked at the story. Some trustees grumbled.

And, it turns out, they were right.

Twice as many schools under review are in the bottom half (the poorer half) of the school board’s Learning Opportunity Index (LOI) as compared to those in the top half. And, of the 16 schools being reviewed in the top half of the LOI, they are all less vulnerable to closure because they have higher enrollment and utilization rates.

The numbers don’t change much however you slice them, by quartiles or quintiles.

But, of course, it’s more complex than that.

The schools under review are grouped with others from across the range of need.

While four of the ARCs contain schools from only the bottom end of the LOI, five other ARCs have poor schools grouped with richer schools. (Only one ARC (at Yonge and Davisville) is reviewing schools from only the top half of the LOI. Perhaps, not surprisingly, because they had higher enrollments, they have recommended no closures.)

Schools which are able to mobilize their parents to attend numerous evening meetings have actively participated in the process, printing buttons and flyers. Other schools, where parents may work additional jobs or evening hours or not be able to afford child care, have not been not in the room, to describe their vision for the future.

By reports, the dynamics at many of the ARCs have not been not great.

What started as a democratic and inclusive process has turned into a long, drawn-out, and divisive process. Staff at one community agency reported to a recent Toronto Neighbourhood Centres meeting how committee members were told they could not speak at a public meeting. Trustees complain openly about each other where ARCs cross ward boundaries. Blogs have been set up. One ARC has moved from outright hostility to a sullen withdrawal from the process.

So, poorer schools have faced a double jeopardy: more poor schools are under review, and they are also far less likely to be participating in a process which requires a strong and active participant voice.

Before the ARC recommendations come up for adoption in May, someone should review the decisions, with an equity lens, to ensure that those with the fewest resources aren’t being cut again.

December 2010 post-script: Schools which were announced to be closed from this round of ARCs are:

  • Brooks Road Public School
  • Heron Park Junior Public School
  • Peter Secor Junior Public School
  • McCowan Road Junior Public School
  • Pringdale Gardens Junior Public School
  • Silverthorn Junior Public School
  • Arlington Middle School
  • Kent Senior Public School-Alpha II

No schools in the Top quintile were closed; two in the Upper income quintile, one a middle school and one an alternative school; one school in the middle-income group; three in the lower-income quintile; and three in the Bottom (closing in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood have been postponed pending further review).

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March 9, 2010

Back again at the Board on the achievement gap

Given the pace of many meetings, I find it’s therapeutic to make dishcloths because, at least, by the end I have done something concrete.

So, last Saturday, I packed up my yarn and went to the public hearings of the TDSB’s Achievement Gap Taskforce, Breaking the Cycle. I wasn’t optimistic that it would be more than some self-congratulatory self-effacing exercise, the kind the Board does every few years but, still, I wanted to listen.

About 25 presenters came to talk to the Taskforce. Others who weren’t quick enough to sign up also sat sprinkled in the audience. A few trustees, the Board Chair, and the Director rotated through during the day.

As should be expected, many deputants appealed for additional resources, calling for more tutors, smaller classes, mentorship programs, and more interpreters.

But the arguments were also more nuanced. Students talked about the disengagement of their fellow students, the lack of responsibility, the lack of motivation.  Staff talked about ensuring the “academic dignity” of their students. Community agencies reminded panelists that if student are having a problem, their families are having a problem – yet they often treated separately. Community members raised the need to understand “lateral violence.”

Others recognized that identified needs would always outstrip available resources, so called for better coordination and a sustained commitment of program resources. Support programs come and go, and the lack of consistency and rapid turnover means that word-of-mouth referrals may often be out of date. Parents are left, not knowing where to turn.

Grade 8/9 transitions were identified as challenging because students are suddenly thrust into a larger environment, with higher expectations and less monitoring. Others called for a shift towards learning to learn.

The strongest theme, among the students who presented, was the need for connection to their schools. Their stories and those of their classmates were about the need to belong and the cost when students are not engaged. Their words underlined what we already know about the importance of building relations to students and community.

Students also described the importance of role models; one young Black student, upon seeing the meeting chair was also Black male, said that made him want to be the one who “rang the bell,” too, to signal time was up. A youth worker veered off his comments when he saw a former teacher and coach in the room, saying that this man in the corner had made the difference between the life he now led as a college-educated community worker and one where he may well have ended up in jail or worse. The room melted at the end of the presentation, when they hugged, student towering over teacher.

Lloyd McKell, the Chair, pressed respondents further for solutions.

The network of Aboriginal and Metis Educators highlighted the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Aboriginal Education Strategy, a concrete framework ready for implementation. They reported that the Toronto Catholic school board already offers Aboriginal Grade 11 English and Grade 9 Visual Arts as core courses rather than as options. Pens scribbled when the network pointed out that enhanced funding is offered to school boards for offering these courses. The network also underscored that these learnings are important to students of all cultures.

Mirroring the Director’s call for a parent academy in his Vision of Hope, a presenter from Hispanic community spoke about a weekly, Spanish-language community-based program for parents which addressed issues such as mental health or multiple intelligences. The need to create supportive social networks was identified as a need for parents as well as students. [At my own daughter’s high school, we once tried to facilitate linguistic groupings at parent information nights, allowing people to find a space where they could network more easily.]

Among the day’s presentations were also some disheartening moments.

Speakers from the Somali community reminded taskforce members that twenty years ago, they had forwarded a similar set of recommendations. They were not implemented, so they were back.

Another presenter explained that when members of the Hispanic community met with one of the then Directors of Education, fifteen years ago, about their concerns for students in their community, they were reportedly told that if the school board did something for them, then the Board would have to “do something for everyone” too.

An final unfortunate note was that since microphones were not available, some speakers, especially women, were difficult to hear.

On the upside, I got two dishcloths done.

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March 1, 2010

TDSB Achievement Gap Task Force

Update June 1, 2010: The Achievement Gap Task Force has released its draft report for review and consultation. Comments will be received until Oct. 31, 2010.

Dr. Chris Spence, the Director of of the Toronto District School Board, has a vision, a Vision of Hope. It’s hit a few bumps, knocked for proposing of a boys-only school and skewered by a trustee, in the media, for doing teacher P.D. in a sports arena.

Still Spence has set some hard targets.

An important part of the Director’s vision around student achievement focuses on building effective schools, as described by Ron Edmunds 30 years ago. Edmunds, Lezotte and others laid out a framework containing the following elements:

  • Clear and Focused School Mission
  • Safe and Orderly Environment
  • High Expectations
  • Opportunity to Learn and Time on Task
  • Instructional Leadership
  • Frequent Monitoring of Student Progress
  • Positive Home-School Relations

But as the saying goes, coming up with the idea is the easy part. The hard part is the administration of it.

So, working on a tight timeline, Spence has set Lloyd McKell, the Executive Officer of Student and Community Equity, to work with an internal staff team to look specifically at the underachievement of racialized and marginalized students.

The taskforce will report to the Board, through the Director, in April. The workload is daunting, including a literature review, a survey of current school programs and public hearings. The hearings are set for March 6. (See More below, for further details.)

A cynic would wonder why they are doing it. Do we really need another study?

As a student of Edmonds, Spence must understand that the first challenge is creating the political will. In Some schools work and more can, Social Policy (1979), Edmonds wrote:

Whether or not we will ever effectively teach the children of the poor is probably far more a matter of politics than of social science, and that is as it should be. It seems to me, therefore, that what is left of this discussion are three declarative statements:

(a) We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling

is of interest to us;

(b) We already know more than we need to do that; and

(c) Whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.

So what remedies might we begin to consider? Our ideas must move beyond platitudes and be specific.

Speaking recently at OISE, Linda Nathan, a principal from an innovative arts school in Boston’s inner city, provided some insights into producing a strong urban education. She explains the problem is not one of an achievement gap, but of opportunity.

In her book The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test (Howard Gardner of Multiple Intelligences writes the jacket blurb), Nathan prescribes school administrators:

  • Develop a clear strategy, for students, parents, and teachers, of active engagement and ownership of the educational process.
  • Investigate the possibilities of incorporating, for example, an arts-based, science-based, or technology-based curriculum
  • Require a rigorous Senior Project that successfully reflects academic and non-academic learning as well as addressing a community need, recognized and documented by the student.
  • Build an assessment system that doesn’t determine student achievement and knowledge exclusively through the results of standardized tests.
  • Mandate paid time for teachers to talk about their practice and their students, and struggle with difficult questions.
  • Advocate for our public schools to equalize educational facilities, expand curricular opportunities, and reduce class size to match our best schools, this providing every child with the necessary education and skills to participate productively in our democratic. This necessarily costs more money!

Within a few months, we’ll see how the TDSB and Torontonians respond to the challenge of providing a good education to all its children.

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February 9, 2010

Toronto Community Partnership Stategy: Councillors get it

An update on a posting in January on the Toronto Community Partnership: Priority Neighbourhood Areas Revised:

On February 22, Toronto City Council will consider a recommendation to adopt a new Toronto Community Partnership Stategy (CSP). The Strategy was approved at the City Committee on Social Development and Recreation at its February 3 meeting. Councillors in attendance were supportive – although perhaps the 100 deputants waiting to speak on the issue of rink time were distracting them.

It’s a system which builds on the work the City has already done in the childcare, homeless, and arts sectors. Acting as a set of indices, the CSP’s goal is to develop “a broadly available, fact-based system for community and political discussions,” according to City staff.

Neighbourhoods which will be prioritized, in planning and resources, are those with low levels of economic security, education⁄ literacy levels and social inclusion. If the CSP’s adopted, the strategy will be piloted in 2011, focusing initially on issues of access and accessibility.

A parallel tool which will facilitate these discussions in the development of an evidence- based, publicly-available, on-line Neighbourhood Wellbeing Index (NWI). The NWI will map out the demographics, local services and “operational metrics” across Toronto neighbourhoods. City staff are pulling together a panel of expert researchers through the summer to determine a structure for the NWI. If all goes well, the NWI may be ready in the fall.

Posted in Community Services, Demographics, Mapping, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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