A startling demographic snapshot of students across Canada's largest school board shows the system is failing to help children overcome roadblocks of culture, race, poverty and family background.
The ambitious personal student survey of achievement, to be made public next week, is a call to action for the Toronto District School Board to try to reduce these barriers over the next five years, says director of education Gerry Connelly.
"It confirms our belief that the status quo for too many of our students is not working," said Connelly in a covering letter for the 55-page report, which shows boys lag behind girls in almost everything including math, that teens born in Mexico tend to fail more Grade 9 courses than classmates born in India, and that students whose first language is English are less likely to pass Ontario's compulsory Grade 10 literacy test than those who speak Hindi or Serbian.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by the Star, was distributed recently to all principals, and Connelly pledged in her note "we will continue to work together to raise the bar and close the gaps in student achievement.
"I am bringing an action plan to address the underachievement of marginalized students that will specify targets and actions to break this cycle over the next five years."
The board's landmark 2006-2007 survey of 105,000 students from Grade 7 to 12 was launched in a bid to pinpoint specifically which students need help in particular areas.
But this first analysis puts local numbers on what educators have known for years – that how children do in school has very much to do with their family background; how rich they are, how many parents they live with, what value their culture tends to place on formal learning, whether they have survived war or are grappling with personal issues.
The differences pose a staggering challenge to schools wanting to give all kids an equal chance.
At a board committee meeting next Thursday, staff will unveil a sweeping new plan aimed at helping students over some of these demographic roadblocks through changes that could range from curriculum and teaching staff to extra free help for certain groups.
Among some of the gaps it will try to address:
Grade 9 students who identify as gay somehow do worse at geography than those who say they are straight – although both do about the same on the literacy test the next year;
Children of single fathers are more likely to do worse at Grade 8 science than children of single mothers – and both do worse than classmates who live with two parents.
Among the 4,800 black students in Grades 7 and 8, the 400 born in Africa are more likely to earn at least a B in math than those born in the Caribbean or Canada.
While board officials are not talking until they put the finishing touches on this blueprint, leading Canadian researchers in the minefield of demographics and learning warn these numbers can be more complex than they seem.
"This isn't some sort of horse race – we do this kind of research in the interest of equity because we know kids from different countries can come to school with different degrees of preparedness, depending on the dominant values of their culture," said Vancouver researcher Bruce Garnett, who has just completed his doctorate in the achievement of immigrant students.
"It's dangerous to use this kind of data to make genetic assumptions. The differences often reflect economic status or the school system in the country you came from."
Experts warn many factors can be knotted together.
Are students who speak Hindi, India's national language, for example, better at the Grade 10 literacy test because they are more likely to live with two professional parents and have studied at an English-language school back in India?
Do African-born black students do better because they are more likely to live with both parents, as research from Princeton University suggests, than blacks born in North America or the Caribbean? Living with both parents is known to boost the chances of school success.
Can children from war zones, who may have had little experience with school at all, expect to keep step with students grounded in the often rigorous schools of eastern Europe or Asia?
"Demographic data can send you down the wrong path if you're not careful, and often what seem like racial differences end up being linked to poverty," said researcher Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University's Centre for Social Organization of Schools.
"At a system-wide level it can be helpful to pinpoint which groups need help, but when you get down to the individual classroom and say all African-American boys need help, well, some will and some won't, and some white girls will need help too, so it becomes more important to track individual students by attendance and grades rather than demographic profile."
Most scholars warn against comparing groups; they say the data is best used as a baseline to track how each group improves over time.
"We know these differences in achievement are not due to native intelligence; Africans are as smart as Asian students who are as smart as anyone else – the country of origin simply does not determine intelligence," said Prof. Lee Gunderson of the University of British Columbia, who has written several books on immigrant students.
"If your family has come from a refugee camp where they were worried about survival, about being murdered, about where the next meal was coming from, you bring a very different focus than a child whose family has been socialized into believing that books are important, that education is important, that becoming a doctor or lawyer is important," said Gunderson, who has written a teachers' guide on how to teach immigrants using more visual aids, more clear vocabulary and even translation.
In the United States, where school boards have been tracking racial data for decades to try to break these same cycles, there is a body of theory on why some groups do better than others, said Garnett.
One school of thought suggests immigrants who come to North America voluntarily have higher hopes and expectations of schools here – and therefore put in more effort – than so-called "conquered" or "colonized" immigrants such as First Nations children or the African-American descendents of slaves, whose skepticism about the fairness of the school system may cause many to feel simply resigned to failure.
While some theories skirt dangerously close to stereotypes, Garnett warns, there are some cultures whose dominant values seem to fuel academic success more than others.
"At the end of the day, the Confucian values of diligence, obedience and industriousness lead many Chinese families to send their kids to get more schooling after the school day ends, and more school is a predictor of success."
Yet no matter what a child`s cultural background or family income or or what language they speak, if Canada is to be truly inclusive, our schools should be able to help all children overcome these barriers, said Gunderson.
And with nearly half of Canadians now born in another country, according to the 2006 Census, every teacher should receive training in how to teach immigrant students.
"For Christ's sake, we can put a man on the moon and a robot on Mars – surely we can figure out how to design lessons in a way that can be understood by children of all backgrounds."
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