No data, no problem, no action
It’s too costly for society not to know how children of various race and ethnicity are doing
Do we know how early the racial gaps in health and education emerge among Canadian children? No, because we have no data.
Dr. Dan Offord, a renowned Canadian child psychiatrist and child advocate, used to say that keeping track of children’s life trajectories — universally, of all children, was the key to “making the race fair” in Canada. Because without data on how young children were doing, how well — or not well — they were developing, nothing could be done to improve their lot, and consequently the lot of youth and adults they would become. Without data, there was no problem and there could be no action.
Over the last few weeks, I have been reflecting on the current events and trying to grasp how much we know about the origins of the well-documented racial gaps in educational achievement, health, susceptibility to risk among adults — such as falling ill and dying due to COVID-19, experiencing hardship and harassment, and how early they emerge, what trajectories they take, what are the specific constellations of social and economic factors that contribute to exacerbation of the gaps, and what are the ones that promote resiliency and closing of these gaps. In contrast to data on, for example, sex and gender, where we learned that boys start as those with more vulnerabilities than girls, but tend to achieve higher academic success, which allowed scientists to provide data for action to promote girls’ learning in the science and maths areas especially — we know little on how exactly and when the racial gaps emerge in Canada, even though we know they are there. In another contrast, our neighbours to the South routinely collect data on the race of children and their teachers. Why is it not only all right, but required, to ask a kindergarten teacher to indicate the child’s race/ethnicity when they complete the Early Development Instrument — a questionnaire on children’s developmental health — in California, but it is not even mentioned as an optional possibility in Ontario?
I am complicit in the lack of such data in the databases I collect. I accepted the situation, once told “it was not possible,” rather than argue that it was important.
The fact that 15 or so years ago, when this conversation took place, the perception of the need for such data was not nearly as clearly understood as it is now is not much of a defence. In data sets available at the population level, in Ontario and Canada, we have very little information on children and adult race/ ethnicity. In large administrative and education databases we study patterns of development in relation to income and parent education, where children live, their health, immigration status, and many other very important aspects of the social determinants of health. But not race. How much are we missing by not having these data? How much of a preventive potential we are not tapping into by not knowing whether the young children who are vulnerable in their development at school entry are more likely to be so if they are not white — or perhaps are in one community but not another? Using the sex difference example, would we have been able to so dramatically increase the girls’ educational achievement had we not known that girls were less likely to do well in math than boys, despite all other factors being equal?
In the past decades, advocating for better data on early child development has also been strengthened by the argument that it is more costly not to know than it is to collect such data. I think time has come to say that it is too costly for us as a society not to know how children of various race and ethnicity are doing. Unless we have the data, and can identify the problem, there will be no action. And there will be no change.