Directors of education should be teachers
Knowledge has long been understood around the world as a tool to exert power.
When vested in the hands of a few, it benefits them and keeps intact the social hierarchies they artificially create. It is why the thinkers, activists and change agents advocate education as key to overcoming barriers. But when knowledge begins to truly take hold among those most in the margins, it also begins to threaten power.
Power is a shape-shifter; it has the resources to cunningly co-opt contemporary language to make itself appear benevolent all the while provoking change to maintain its dominance.
A provision in Ontario’s Bill 197 that was passed into law Tuesday is one such example of power working in its own interest. New Democrat MPP Rima Berns-McGown called it “a terrible change with enormous implications for public education.”
“It’s terrifying that it’s been slipped through in an undemocratic way that doesn’t allow for public comment or discussion,” she said.
You’d be forgiven for thinking a bill named COVID-19 Economic Recovery Act is about the economic recovery. Yet, the omnibus bill carried a potent motion with far-reaching implications for our children: directors of education, appointed by school boards, no longer need to be teachers. What does it have to do with economic recovery? Does it create more jobs?
It doesn’t. It does, however, refer to the need to fill an impending emptying out of the top spot in 20 school boards across the province. That number came Tuesday in the legislature from Education Minister Stephen Lecce, who posited the motion as “an opportunity for generational change” and to hire racialized people. “Just four per cent of directors visible minorities,” he said.
Look closer and the new law’s anti-racist pretensions fall apart. There are at least a few problems with it.
One, this stated preference for racialized candidates is only verbal. The words “racialized” or “visible minority” don’t make it to the legislation.
Even if we’re to take the minister’s avowals at face value, systemic racism means there are not many racialized leaders across sectors (and racialized does not always mean antiracist).
Two, why not choose from among qualified leaders of colour from within the system instead of poaching the few leaders who make it to leadership positions in other industries despite discrimination?
Some of the names that education experts have suggested include Colleen Russell-Rawlings, Peel’s interim director; Camille Logan and Cecil Roach from York; Jeewan Chanicka, formerly of TDSB; and Poleen Grewal from Peel.
That is still inadequate to fill the upcoming vacancies, but the province could easily lead the battle against racism by removing barriers to discrimination within its own education system by identifying, training and developing the many talented BIPOC educators in school boards into positions of power.
This brings us to point three, which has so alarmed Ontarians that a one-day-old petition against the bill already has 30,000 signees.
“It allows them (the ministry) to bring in a CEO from Bay Street to inject a privatization agenda,” said Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.
“You don’t need someone with an educational background when you want to privatize the system,” New Democrat MPP Chris Glover said in the legislature.
As the public petition said, prioritizing profit over care could mean larger classrooms, more online learning and reduced course options in high schools.
“We’ve seen this in the U.S.,” Barriffe said, where the superintendents (as directors are called) are not necessarily educators.
“They see education as a cost-cutting exercise as opposed to providing funding required for learning.”
Let’s not kid ourselves, Ontario already has a multi-tiered education system: private schools for the rich, public schools for the rest, which in turn administer education unevenly.
It reserves its worst side for the same demographics that have been marginalized for generations — namely the poor, those with disabilities, with learning needs, and children who are Black and Indigenous and with other marginalized identities.
Reducing resources doesn’t address systemic racism, but perpetuates it. Vulnerable children need schools with budgets for more social workers, psychologists, child abuse therapists and other support staff.
The education ministry needs to transform the public school system, not underline and exacerbate the divides by hiring leaders without a teaching background, with little grasp not only of how segregation worked historically but how it manifests today, little appreciation of anti-oppressive policies as they pertain to education, little exposure to the nuances of best practices on the ground, in front of class and worst of all, little understanding of those who should be centred in the system: the students.
The new law based on Bill 197 takes a whack at one of few systems in Canada that has potential to be revolutionary — a high-quality education system, for all.
It’s underhanded for a government that has positioned itself as helping fight antiBlack racism in schools — especially with its responsiveness to the Black community concerns in the Peel board — to try to ram through actions that would hurt Black children, among others, with little public debate and scrutiny.
All in the name of a health emergency.