Unreported research by the Toronto District School Board shows that English-speaking Caribbean immigrants are those most at risk of failing to complete high school.
By Andrew DuffyThe research offers more evidence that blacks continue to be poorly served by the school system a decade after Ontario's Royal Commission on Learning decried the collective underachievement of black students.
While the Toronto District School Board no longer breaks down its academic data by race or ethnicity, according to senior board officials, it does track key "indicators" that have proven to be important predictors of high-school success. The board breaks these down by the geographic regions where students were born.
One of the board's current indicators looks at credit accumulation at the end of Grade 10, when students are supposed to have 16 credits. Previous research has shown that the accumulation of credits early in high school is a telling measure of whether students will graduate.
The results, published in a June, 2003, report titled, "Student Success Indicators, 2001-2002," show that 54 per cent of students born in the English-speaking Caribbean had 14 credits or fewer at the end of Grade 10. The board considers these students to be at risk of failing to complete high school within the next three years.
Forty-five per cent of students born in Western Africa, Central and South America were at risk, as well as 39 per cent of East African students.
Researchers found that 27 per cent of Canadian-born students were at risk based on the same criterion.
Students born in South Asia (24 per cent), Eastern Europe (23 per cent) and Eastern Asia (16 per cent) were less likely to be at risk than Canadian-born students.
According to an earlier tracking study conducted by the Toronto board ? researchers followed students who entered high school in 1993 for five years ? the vast majority (90 per cent) of those who had earned a full complement of 16 credits by the end of Grade 10 graduated three years later. Those who failed or dropped a course by the end of Grade 10 were much less likely (62 per cent) to graduate. Graduation rates diminished significantly for each additional missing credit. The latest Toronto research raises still more questions about how well the city's public education system is serving certain black students.
The issue was first brought into focus by Ontario's Royal Commission on Learning, appointed by Bob Rae's NDP government in May, 1993, at a time when the education system was under attack for its lack of accountability and its fuzzy standards.
In its 550-page report, a five-member panel said dramatic steps had to be taken to address what it called "a crisis among black youth with respect to education and achievement."
"There must not be the slightest doubt that this commission shares the great concern, the desperation even of the black community about the underachievement of black students as a group," the panel wrote.
The commission recommended that Toronto establish demonstration schools focused on the needs of black students; that province-wide test results be assessed by race, gender, cultural background and family income; that classroom materials be reviewed to ensure they're devoid of bias and that more minorities be trained as teachers.
Few of the recommendations were acted upon. Formal demonstration schools were not developed and the province's testing agency, the Education Quality and Accountability Office, does not break down test scores by race or region of birth.
Today, it's hard to accurately describe the effect of those cumulative decisions on black and other minority students since those statistics are no longer generated. But Toronto's student success indicators, and a cross tabulation performed using results of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, do raise questions.
Researchers found a dramatic relationship between neighbourhood income and achievement: 39 per cent of students in the lowest-income neighbourhoods were at risk compared to 11 per cent in the neighbourhoods with the highest income.
Differences between academic streams were also dramatic when it came to the Grade 10 literacy test: 80 per cent of students in the academic stream passed compared to 25 per cent of students in the applied stream. Blacks have, historically, been over-represented in the applied stream, but again, there is no data to show whether that continues to be the case.
Board officials concede the existence of the literacy test as a graduation requirement raises the possibility that the dropout rate among black students will rise still further.
Gerry Connelly, associate director of the Toronto board insists race-based data is not needed to understand and react to the problem. "Even though we don't have specific data, we know that there's a problem," she says. "We're working with the communities as well as with the particular students. But we need to do more."
Other educators, however, believe it is vital for the education system to accurately identify those students at risk and build targeted programs to help them.
"If you don't know who is not making it, then how do you put your resources where they'll make a difference?" asks Veronica Lacey, president of The Learning Partnership and Ontario's former deputy minister of education. "If you want to change the performance of the system, the best way to do it is to put your resources into the kids who are not achieving."
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National Newspaper Award-winning reporter Andrew Duffy is the 2003 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. The Ottawa Citizen reporter, formerly with THE STAR, recently completed his year-long study of the relationship between immigration and education in Canada.
