Urban Moods and Urban Myths: Do Neighbourhoods Matter for Mental Health? Café Scientifique. Presented by The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH). Tuesday, February 17, 7-9 pm: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. West, Toronto. Free, all welcome.
To RSVP, e-mail Tynama at smh dot toronto dot on dot ca
February 13, 2009
February 17 Event: Neighbourhoods & Mental Health
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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)
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….
November 9, 2008
Class Warfare, they say….
broke out in Leslieville last week. Some of you may have seen the news reports.
Signs, looking much like the “No Big Box” posters which sprouted in front windows around the neighbourhood all summer long, were plastered to telephone poles and mail boxes, saying “No Yuppies in Leslieville.” Official reaction was swift. The signs were scraped off wherever they were found because, although they reflected tension in the neighbourhood, they also, unfortunately, crossed the line of free speech with an incitement to violence, in the small print, invited readers to smash windows.
Almost all who saw the posters had a strong reaction to them – either positive or, in politer company, more negative. It was after all all evocative act, one which had also sprung up in graffitti on condo bill boards or in murmurs on street corners.
The neighbourhood is in flux. According to the the South Riverdale demographic profile on the City of Toronto website, from 1996 to 2001, median household incomes grew by nearly $11,000 and the number of people who fall below the low income cut-off fell by 29%. See The 2006 numbers are still being crunched but will no doubt show the trend continues.
It is, as the local city councillor Paula Fletcher, says, a mixed neighbourhood. But it is, more accurately a neighbourhood, in transition. And that is a time when tensions, rightly or wrongly will surface.
The Toronto Sun, former bastion of the working class, rose quickly to the defense of “Yuppies” and those who like “venti pumpkin-spiced lattes.” Ignored were the complaints of rising rents and new, too-expensive stores.
The Toronto Star obfuscated, explaining that because the process wasn’t complete, because the neighbourhood still had rough edges, this wasn’t gentrification – and so, presumably, no one should be up in arms about the neighbourhood newcomers who were driving up housing prices (and therefore realty taxes). People are arriving, we are told, because they like the grittiness of the neighbourhood; no worries about what happened similarly on Queen St. West.
Even Garth Turner, (yes former Conservative M.P.), describes a process of gentrification in Leslieville (or South Riverdale if you have lived there longer) where “Greedy developers are trying to turn it into a yuppie park, which will displace those who have lived there affordably.” Turner says that the neighbourhood will never switch to upper class enclave, though, like nearby Riverdale or the Beach. He explains, in his blog advising a woman to sell and move away, that Leslieville is “iffy” and “a dump” hemmed in by highways and hosting a “smelly” waste treatment plant.
Still, whether Leslieville/South Riverdale becomes so trendy that it reaches some magic gentrification tipping point, some people are feeling angry about the changes in their neighbourhood.
At a minimum, a space for community dialogue is needed.
Belonging Community 