Tailoring Schools for Students

By Jonathan Jenkins, Queen's Park Bureau

Updated: Sunday, November 27, 2011 05:22 PM EST

For all the controversy surrounding the Toronto District School Board's decision to add a high school to its existing Africentric program, it's easy to forget Toronto has a history of ethnocentric schooling dating 30 years.

The First Nations School of Toronto opened in 1977 and currently has 80 elementary students enrolled.

"It fits into the landscape so quietly that you don't think about it," said Ontario NDP education critic Peter Tabuns, whose the local MPP for the Broadview Ave.-Dundas St. area — the location of the school.

First Nations is just one of TDSB's 19 alternative elementary and 22 alternative high schools.

Provincial officials say there are dozens of similar alternative programs offered in other boards across the province — including other Aboriginal schools in the North — making the Africentric experiment even less unique.

"We give our boards the responsibility to determine how they are going to ensure that their students are successful," Education Minister Laurel Broten said.

"From our perspective, what we're very clear about is we want every student to have space where they can learn, where they feel included, where they have a reflection of their reality in the teachings they're getting.

"We've made a lot of steps from the provincial perspective in order to move forward with equity and inclusion and ensure our schools are modern in terms of our curriculum. That's our responsibility."

And if the process for arriving at an alternative program can be messy and chaotic — not surprising when it's largely driven from the grassroots up — so be it.

"The school board's responsibility is to take that framework and to determine what that means in their community, and have that local conversation about that," Broten said.

It's a similar situation in Alberta, where local boards such as Edmonton Public Schools have been offering alternative programs since 1974, starting with French immersion.

Edmonton Public now has some 27 alternative programs, covering everything from an Aboriginal school to lacrosse training to performing arts — and even some faith-based options — all within the publicly-funded system.

Amiskwaciy Academy, Edmonton's Aboriginal school, has about 200 junior and senior high school students and bills itself as the first of its kind in the country.

Winnipeg's public school system also offers ethnocentric education for Aboriginal students at Niji Mahkwa elementary school and the Children of the Earth High School.

Pressure from local parents on their school boards — similar to the efforts of Toronto parents on the Africentric school — helped kickstart such programs in western Canada as well but the Alberta government has offered another route to school choice.

Since 1994, non-profit organizations or companies can approach the minister of education and ask to become a charter school.

Charter schools get public dollars, must accept qualified students and must offer a unique program not available in the local public system, in addition to meeting the established curriculum. Their numbers are capped at 15 and there are currently 13 operating in the province, mostly in Calgary.

Just over 1% of Alberta's students attend a charter school, and the government last January put out a questionnaire seeking input on how to rejig the rules.

"One of the original purposes of charter schools was that they would be centres of innovation and would share innovations with the rest of the system," says a discussion paper on charter schools' future on the Alberta government web page.

"This purpose has largely not been realized."

Alberta's unease with charters is likely to make it that much harder for advocates to advance their cause here in Ontario, despite the enthusiasm U.S. President Barack Obama has shown for the concept.

Progressive Conservatives — traditional champions of school choice — have been chastened by former leader John Tory's disastrous embrace of faith-based school funding in the 2007 election and are hesitant to return to the same territory.

PC education critic Lisa MacLeod was not available for comment, but the party's website lays out in unequivocal terms where the party stands.

Opponents, the website says, are "fear mongering that the Ontario PCs will bring in charter schools, school vouchers and merit pay for teachers.

"None of this is true. None of these policies will be part of the Ontario PC education plan."

To Tabuns, who was sceptical about the virtues of an Africentric school but satisfied with the process that brought it about, maintained Ontario's existing options for school choice is likely strong enough to keep charter schools away.

"A public consultation with parents expressing their needs and boards assessing whether they're valid, whether the solutions proposed make sense is not a bad process," he said. "It seems pretty democratic to me.

"For the moment, there is still a great attachment to the public system and the public system has been flexible enough to hold onto people. I don't see the kind of pressure for charter schools in Ontario the way we have seen in the United States. The fact that school boards have been responsive has been part of keeping down that impulse towards charter schools."