New Toronto District School Board Director Chris Spence is showing himself fearless in the face of controversy. But he’s got a hard case to make if he is going to convince Torontonians that a boys’ school is a good way to address underachievement.
As part of the his move to open the discussion, Dr. Leonard Sax, the executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, was invited to address Toronto parents and trustees last week.
It didn’t go over well.
Perhaps most scathing was Trustee Mari Ruka’s summary of the talk (see More below). (Trustee Rutka is infamous for her arguments against the separate nature of Africentric schools, saying that if the school board proceeded, it should, by the same logic, set up schools for students who are “fat” or “red-headed.”)
Several OISE graduates have also begun a Facebook string on the topic of boy’s schools.
Pointing to the fact that both populations face underachievement, Spence used the same arguments used for the Africentric school launched earlier this year in the TDSB. Learning styles, which is what the boys’ school advocates seem to centre on, are not the same as the cultural inheritance arguments put forward for Black-focused schools. The arguments for separation are blurrier because gender identities are blurrier. (Sax’s ill-received attempts at humour probably failed because they too predictably relied on gender stereotypes.).
Black-focused/Africentric schools are also open to all students – different again from Spence and Sax’s arguments of how (some) boys may need a “girl-free” environment.
As the parent of a son, I have often argued for more “boy-friendly” learning environments. However, unlike my stance on Africentric schools, I still wait to be convinced that he, and boys like him, would be best served in a single-sex school.
The reports are in: bed bugs aren’t just found in nursery rhymes.
In case you missed the media hyperbole a few weeks ago, it was stunning. The National Post led with the story of the spread of bed bugs on transit vehicles and other public spaces. CBC’s The National covered the release of the two reports, released simultaneously, at Toronto City Hall. A section of the print story on the CBC website was subtitled “psychologically terrorized.”
The stories reflected the panicky mood of the 100+ crowd who attended the launch of the reports, commissioned by Habitat Services and WoodGreen Community Services. Many of those in attendance felt compelled to speak from the floor after the presentation, and boxes of reports disappeared by the armload.
The two bed bug reports focus on the policy responses required to combat the spread of bed bugs and, also, on what to do if you are battling the pests.
The message was clear: bed bugs are back. Toronto Public Health has already agreed to direct some of its scarce resources to low income residents faced with the high costs of extermination.
Both reports are available on the WoodGreen website in the What’s New section. [Full disclosure: this is the agency where I work.]
OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling packed them in for a lecture tonight by Linda Nathan called Grappling with the Hardest Questions: Why Must Schools Talk Openly About Race and Achievement and What Happens When They Do.
Nathan is co-headmaster of Boston’s Arts Academy (BAA), a small public high school located across from Fenway Park, where kids from all economic and racial backgrounds can take advantage of the kind of specialized education institution to which upper and middle class parents often send their children.
In a school with such diversity, BAA has worked to ensure all students achieve. In the No Child Left Behind ethos, this means making sure students achieve. As Nathan writes in her new book, The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test:
For the majority of educators of good will who are teaching in urban schools—many of them, though obviously not all, white women—the achievement gap is a hugely personal issue. The notion that today’s schools are not helping to equalize opportunity in the way American schools are supposed to do is not just a frustration. It haunts us.
If schools are going to ensure the achievement gap is closed, she writes, it will take more than the piles binders of disaggregated data which simply reiterate the problem.
Instead, Nathan argues schools need to
Teachers and students became involved in the difficult conversation about race and opportunity at BAA.
“If we don’t speak the truth we all see,” she explained to the audience, “we won’t make sustainable change.”
Nathan urges us to think about the structures that create opportunity.
More than artistry, BAA teaches citizenry.
Schools, she said, must be places where we want to belong. The stories she told (and others) emphasized the participatory and democratic natures of the schools where Nathan’s worked. (She felt odd, she explained, telling these stories without the students with her now, but cross-border travel does present complications.)
94% of BAA’s students go on to post-secondary studies—and Nathan says there is still room for improvement.
The lesson, unnerving as it may be for Canadians, is that when race is explicitly addressed, when students are fully engaged, and when opportunity is created, there is no achievement gap.
Gentrification is fifty years old this year, UBC professor and Canada Research Chair in Geography David Ley explained to a University of Toronto audience earlier this week. Or at least the word “gentrification” is.
Although attributed to sociologist Ruth Glass first in 1964, the term can be found in an unpublished paper of hers five years earlier. Glass’ definition still holds up well, Ley explained. Gentrification is the movement of middle income households into lower income or working-class neighbourhoods.
Ley was speaking a Cities Centre hosted lecture entitled “Are there limits to gentrification? Evidence from Vancouver.” Reflecting back on the decades of work he has done on Vancouver neighbourhoods, Ley made the following points, some new, some old.
Shifts in the housing and labour markets are linked
While the labour marker and the housing market have been “commonly partitioned in academia,” they are coupled.
Citing the historical shifts in Cabbagetown, Ley read off a list of occupations from the 1960s and then a few decades afterwards. Physicians replaced Punch Press Operators. Teachers replaced transit workers. Higher income occupations replaced working class occupations. (It’s similar to the process I have described in my own neighbourhood in an earlier post.)
“Clearly a social change was going on,” said Ley.
The growth in the managerial and professional class occurred at the same time as the closure of factories were disappearing from Canada’s 5 largest metropolitan areas. Almost as an aside, Ley pointed out the unrecognized role good quality public sector jobs has played in generating this shift. [One can’t help thinking how this links to Richard Florida’s idea of the creative classes.)
So, as the labour market shifted, the housing markets were likely to follow.
Industrial transition is the meta-narrative in the story of gentrification.
Gentrification plays out differently in different places because of the varied conditions. Urban areas with a stronger industrial base, such as Winnipeg and Windsor, will be less likely to face gentrification than post-industrial cities, such as Toronto. During the 1970s and 80s, for example, Toronto gained 60,000 of these higher status jobs while 75,000 jobs were lost in other parts of the economy.
The movement of artists predicts gentrification
The presence of artists other “pre-professionals” (with a lot of cultural capital, but little economic capital) signals a neighbourhoods in transition.
Ley described artists as modern magicians, transforming the material world of disinvested neighbourhoods, creating cachet. Young professionals, eager to pick up such cultural capital, soon follow, driving prices up. So artists are continually shunted along out of the secure neighbourhoods into other working class, and often non-English -speaking, ones.
“So where they were in 1971, they are gone. And where they weren’t, they are in 1991,” Ley said. “Their concentration leads to their own elimination.”
The middle class then begins to move in, once terra incognito is proven. In Toronto, we saw movement along Bloor Street as this occurred. In Vancouver, the growth was along Main Street.
So what kinds of neighbourhoods has gentrification favoured?
Ley’s study of Vancouver neighbourhoods since the 1970s found these patterns:
This is the founding pattern. Ley said wryly that he missed the opportunity in the 970s to become a millionaire when he had the predictive model to see where gentrification would spread. Instead, Ley said, he had only the deep moral satisfaction that he had had the insight, if not the wit, to invest.
“However, once the market is ‘proven,’ a much more eclectic, experimental phase follows,” Ley explained, “and areas likely to gentrify become much harder to predict.”
Some neighbourhoods resist gentrification
People have been talking about the imminent gentrification of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Grandview Woodland for 35 years, Ley explained. It has many heritage buildings, walkable, close to water and some tree-lined streets, all indicators in the earlier model of a place ripe for gentrification. And yet, they remain, some of the poorest census tracts in Canada.
Attempts at gentrification are regularly made by hopeful arrivals. Condo marketers have played off this grittiness, advertising, “Be bold or move to the suburbs.” But, as one local business owner said to Ley, “these people just wash through.”
So how have these neighbourhoods resisted persistent attempts to move them upscale?
Ley’s short answer: A complex local sense of place which is unfriendly to gentrification
Ley’s longer answer:
Neighbourhoods “in decline” are where poor people are housed, yet, Ley cautioned later, governments need to be cautious about intervening there, as improvements may lead to displacements.
Gentrifiers can triumph through persistent incrementalism
“There is clear evidence gentrifiers are trying to change their externalities,” Ley said as he flipped a transparency onto the overhead.
The graph showed the number of complaints about the smell emanating from the local rendering plant. A wave of complaints in the 1990s lead to changes. Then, in 2005, the complaints sky-rocketed, doubling, even when additional changes were made.
Ley flipped another transparency onto the overhead: An excerpt from the Globe & Mail’s real estate section, Done Deal. A five bedroom house with a two bedroom rental unit in Grandview Woodland.
It is one of the dichotomies of the private market, Ley explained, later in answer to a question from the audience. “The bottom line is if we have a free-market in land, than those with the most money will outbid others and hold the land.”
Recognizing the right to the city for poor people
The Downtown Eastside has held gentrification at bay, mainly, Ley says because 40% of housing in the neighbourhoods is non-market. The City has sustained affordable housing units, and neighbourhood residents and organizations have a “poor people’s turf” legitimate.
The local ethos is preservation, public investment and revitalization without displacement. It is a grudging recognition of a right to the city for poor people.
Government regulation and policy is central
In the past century, Ley explains, neo-liberal policies have encouraged the spread of gentrification and the displacement of poor people because of the lack of investments it has made in affordable housing. Escalating levels of public debt will work against the revival of a welfare state that will create new housing.
The current push for sustainable housing and improved “eco-densities” will further aggravate the problem of affordable housing and further prime the inequality that is running the poor out of Canadian cities, Ley explained.
Although newer developments purport to improve densities, building taller buildings, the units are large and use more expensive materials, leaving those with low incomes displaced form the areas being “renewed.” Indeed these taller buildings often have fewer people in them then low-rises they replaced.
Gentrification cannot be benign
Strictly speaking, if higher-end housing units are built as infill or on brownfield, displacement of the poor is not an issue.
However, Ley explained in response to an audience question, the argument shifts then to the affects beyond the building unit itself, such as whether other middle income households are then drawn to the area. Housing co-ops, for instance, have been argued to prime neighbourhoods for gentrification. One social housing service provider explained to Ley that they want their housing to be “gritty” so that it doesn’t generate these external effects.
Finally, approached afterwards on the topic of mixed neighbourhoods, Ley explained that social mixing is usually just a transitional stage, on the way to complete gentrification.
The audience would have stayed longer to flesh out the lecture further, but another class arrived, this time to face an exam.
The De-fence Project is coming to Riverdale.
One of my favourite direct action groups is the Toronto Space Committee’s De-fence Project. With an obvious sense of fun, the group encourages homeowners to take down the front yard chain-link fences which were popular in many downtown neighbourhoods.
The fences were considered an improvement when they began their spread in the 1970s over the higher wooden fences of earlier times. The open links allowed air flow while maintaining security. Yet, as the De-fence crew says, our front gardens end up looking like jail yards.
I remember the delight my family felt when a former neighbour with a large, ill-mannered dog moved away. Our delight was compounded because the new neighbour was glad to have us take down the fence between us, and to simply allow the day lilies define our border.
The Globe and Mail’s Architourist’ Dave LeBlanc wrote a recent article the movement to neighbours sharing their yards rather than fencing them. His focus was on the suburbs.
Join the De-fence volunteers Sunday October 18th, and bring pliers and work gloves, if you’ve got them.
11am: 180 Riverdale Avenue
Noon: 173 Riverdale Avenue
1:30: 157 Withrow Avenue
2:30: 124 Wolfrey Avenue.
GOOGLE MAP: http://tinyurl.com/ylyr6b5
For further info, contact: defence@publicspace.ca
The Ontario-based 25-in-5 Network for Poverty Reduction met in the basement of a community agency this week to hear some radical news. U of T’s Ernie Lightman and Andy Mitchell were at the front of the room. Economist Hugh Mackenzie had joined them. Policy wonk John Stapleton came in soon afterwards. Various funders, networks and advocacy groups sat around the room. Now Magazine’s Alice Klein sat at the side.
Lightman explained that this was a preliminary discussion rather than an off-the-record one.
We were there to discuss the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). Despite the hue and cry against it, Mitchell and Lightman’s analysis was showing that it is a progressive tax.
When the HST was announced, Lightman, habituated by a long history watching the Department of Finance and Treasury Board, was an early critic. Soon after he was interviewed one morning on CBC radio, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan followed with his own rebuttal: university professors shouldn’t speak about things they didn’t know about, Duncan said.
Lightman, to his credit, took up Duncan’s challenge. He and Mitchell, a stats master, met with Treasury Board staff, gathered some data and began the number-crunching. The preliminary results have induced them to rethink their original position and to broaden the discussion to this audience.
Mitchell’s analysis looked at the announced changes to the HST, personal income tax and Ontario Tax Credits and their combined effect on economic families (which includes singles too). The calculations did not include the transitional “bribe”. Here’s what they found:
Now, Mitchell and Lightman cautioned this was a projection using SPSM Stats Can data. It does not account for any changes in spending habits which may occur after the changes are brought in. So, for instance, if a consumer decides to a get a haircut less frequently because of the higher costs, then these numbers may shift.
As the gathered group began to thresh through what this meant, a few obvious advocacy positions emerged.
Hugh Mackenzie had the final part of the discussion, framing the importance of taxes because they boost “the robust fiscal capacity of government which allows government to drive services.” And, if services are boosted, as his work with Richard Shillington last spring in A Quiet Bargain showed, the poor were more likely to receive an equitable share. When it’s implemented, this “tax-grabbing” change introduced by the Ontario Liberal government may just raise enough millions and billions to do that.
The HST sounds like a good deal to anti-poverty activists, after all.
Late arrivers had to sit along the steps in the auditorium at New College/U of T. Ed Broadbent led off Social Planning Toronto’s Building the Future We Want symposium. Chief economist at the TD Bank Don Drummond sat in the second row, his session and chance to answer was up next. Potential candidate for mayor of Toronto Glen Murray was scheduled to finish at the end of the day.
It was the place to be. Registration had had to be cut off. Organizers were also wise enough to schedule long breaks so that registrants could network. {Shameless ad inserted here: If you haven’t become a member of the newly re-branded SPT, you should.}
I couldn’t stay for long, but even the few morning hours I attended yielded some great quotable quotes. Here’s two:
What did you hear?
