Class Divide

Some parents say their children need gifted-education programs. But not all kids are benefiting from the public-school streaming system

- Katrina Onstad

THE PLANNING and Priorities Committee was meeting in the boardroom: it was more Kafka than Kanye, so it was incongruous to see teenagers in this setting — like walking into a passport office to find the waiting room filled with lemurs. But there they were (teens, not lemurs), on a cold night this past January, in a brick-slab office building of the Toronto District School Board. Several trustees sat around a giant U-shaped desk facing a gallery crowded with parents, educators, and assorted members of the public.

Wherever they are, even in airless rooms boggy with Robert’s Rules of Order, teenagers bring with them their loping awkward energy, inappropriately beeping cell phones, and barely suppressed giggles. Of course, their presence shouldn’t have been strange, because young people and their futures were what everyone was there to talk about — sort of.

The largest school board in Canada has some large problems to solve. Dropout rates for black students are twice as high as they are for white kids. Black, Latino, and Indigenous kids are much less likely than their white counterparts to be enrolled in university-track, “ academic” classes and more likely to find themselves in the more trade-oriented “applied” classes as early as grade nine. That means that, before many of these kids are even through puberty, options for their futures are severely curtailed: a York University study found that only 53 percent of black students in Toronto were in an academic-stream program versus 81 percent of white students and 80 percent of other racialized groups.