Race to the Bottom
How Ontario schools can fight racism in the classroom—and win
BY Kevin Black
Illustration by Joshua Leipciger
It’s so rare for students in Ontario schools to learn about racism in the classroom that Robin Pearson started an Equity Club in the southern Ontario high school where she was a teacher, to supplement the curriculum’s failings. “We saw all of the support for anti-racist education cut by the provincial Tory government when they closed the [Ministry of Education’s] anti-racism department in 1995,” says Pearson, who has since left teaching to work as an ESL consultant.
The small club met weekly to study examples of racism in history and the present day and learn about multi-ethnic role models. But mainly it was a forum to discuss whatever equity topic the students wanted to talk about. The club disbanded when Pearson left the school. And while the provincial Liberals have begun to pay attention to equity issues in Ontario schools, there is still little support in place to educate new teachers and get things going.
It needn’t be this way. The ministry has a visionary blueprint for effectively addressing racism, but 12 years have passed since its creation and nothing substantial has changed: The teaching of antiracism occurs only by chance, not by design.
An examination of Ontario’s curriculum reveals deep flaws that prevent teaching anti-racism. Specifically, the word racism cannot be found within the kindergarten to Grade 12 curriculum for any compulsory course and is only included in two of 22 ministry-approved Canadian history textbooks published before 2000. As well, school board anti-racist policies typically focus on overt racism—such as physical or verbal harassment—rather than subtle racism such as stereotyping, exclusionary history and policies that disproportionately harm minority students, such as zero tolerance for violence.
The problem persists in teachers’ colleges, as well. Courses in anti-racist teaching methods are elective, so only those teachers interested in equity learn about it. Ultimately, there is no guarantee that students will read about or discuss the issue in their schools. This failing affects all students, whatever their skin colour and ethnic background, but most obviously, it lets down the people most affected by racism: Ontario’s visible minorities, who represent 20 percent of the total population or about 40 percent of people in urban centres like Toronto.
When I surveyed high school graduates in 2000 as part of the province’s first anti-racist curriculum evaluation, they gave their schools a D+. “I can’t say that I can really remember learning about one racial or ethnocultural role model,” said one graduate. “There was nothing that looked at racism, nothing in my curriculum at all,” said another.
George Dei, chair of sociology and equity studies in education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says there are a number of teachers who should be recognized for their anti-racism work. “But there are also many who have closed their minds,” he adds. “We cannot wish racism away. We must acknowledge and respond to it.”
In 1993 the ministry did just that, publicly recognizing that “some existing policies, procedures, and practices in the school system are racist in their impact, if not their intent.” It also declared the importance of providing accurate information about a range of ethnocultural groups and discussing and challenging racism. Dei says those guidelines were a step in the right direction, but there was nothing to back them up. “Anti-racist policies need teeth and must produce consequences for those who fail to implement them,” he says.
To meet its promise, the ministry must ensure that the causes and patterns of discrimination are included in all new curricula and textbooks. To support this, anti-racist teaching skills should become mandatory for graduation from teachers’ colleges.
During the tenure of Ontario’s Conservative government, Dei found anti-racism thwarted by politicians. “They dismissed people’s concerns about inequity as the voice of special interests,” he says, while simultaneously disbanding the ministry’s anti-racism division and atrophying funding for heritage languages, ESL and school-community liaisons.
All that was supposed to change, according to Gerard Kennedy, Ontario’s minister of education. Just after the Liberal Party’s election victory in 2003, he said his party was committed to reversing those losses, promising increased funding, autonomous curriculum councils, community empowerment and school inspections that would ensure the values of antiracism were upheld across the province.
Those changes, should they occur, would be applauded because overcoming racism requires support not just from communities but from the government as well. “Anti-racism can no longer be left to the discretion of schools, principals and individual teachers,” says Dei, as Ontario has always done, subtly telling students that subconscious racism—too often the fourth R in education—is less important than reading, writing and arithmetic.
