Critical Injustice

“Equity” continues to breed inequality in the Peel District School Board

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

By Igor Stravinski 

Since the Ministry of Education’s Peel District School Board review was presented on November 27, 2019, the driving force behind the senior administration has been to “dismantle systemic anti-black racism”. The review started with the assumption that systemic anti-black racism existed, as evidenced by the subpar academic performance (on average) of black male students, then worked backwards from there to find it by soliciting “lived experiences” (anecdotal evidence) for it from a small number of cherry-picked students and self-appointed staff and community members. As such, the review was a foregone conclusion. Vast resources have been expended ever since to address this problem- a problem which there is absolutely no empirical evidence to show actually exists.  

Some of the actions taken seem benign, even helpful to certain lucky individuals. The University of Toronto Black Student Mentorship program is an example. According to a recent article in the Brampton Guardian this program has been very well received by the black students and parents who are benefiting from it. And who can fault those students and parents for jumping at the chance to get an advantage in the highly competitive world of post-secondary education? But like all the initiatives that have spawned from the PDSB review, this one leaves those of a traditional social justice mindset with misgivings.  

According to traditional social justice, all people should be treated equally and provided equal opportunities to the greatest extent possible. All people should have the chance to take charge and improve their lot in life. Talented and hard-working individuals should prosper from their efforts, and advance in life based on their merits, not be held back or blocked due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. That of course does not mean that anyone who is successful has reached that position as a result of talent and hard work! This obvious reality is why Critical Social Justice enthusiasts like to talk about “the myth of the meritocracy”, as if no one ever achieved anything due to their abilities and determination to fight against adversity. 

But in academia, and increasingly in mainstream society, this concept of social justice championed by the great civil rights leaders of the 1960s and beyond has been set aside in  favour of Critical Social Justice, an ideology which holds that people do not exist as individuals but rather as entities found along an intersecting continuum of privilege to oppression. Society is “white supremacist”, we are told, and also favours males and heterosexuals. Left unchecked, the system will always greatly benefit those on the privileged end of this intersectional continuum at the expense of the oppressed people at the other end of the scale. The only solution, according to Critical Social Justice, is to place people into a category along it and then provide those deemed “oppressed” with advantages (such as hand-outs and short cuts) to level the playing field. 

The purpose here is not to debunk Critical Social Justice Theory. For those with an open mind, Charles Pincourt, James Lindsay, John McWhorter, Glen Loury, and many others have already done a far more eloquent job than I could do with regard to that. My goal is rather to remind those concerned about the entrenchment of Critical Social Justice that although three years have passed, and we just had a municipal election (meaning there are a new crop of School Board Trustees) that the PDSB is still under direction from the Ministry of Education. The supervisor running the system (Bruce Rodriguez) is still taking his cues from a small cabal of Critical Social Justice oriented community social activists and the devastating results are compounding as time goes by. 

Take the example of the above-mentioned University of Toronto Mississauga Black Student Mentorship Program. On the face of it, the program strives to achieve “equity”. Black students are underrepresented in university programs generally and especially in STEM fields. This program aims to address that by giving an extra push to academically oriented black students who might otherwise underachieve and not reach their full potential, as, let’s be honest, most of us do to some degree. 

But is that equitable? There are many students who would benefit from such a program. What is the reasoning behind offering this only to black students? These are kids who are already doing quite well in the school system, or they would not be university bound. They would most likely be successful in life without this program (but it certainly won’t hurt). To be blunt, they enjoy some measure of privilege. Meanwhile there are many students, of many “races”, who really need help to avoid falling into society’s cracks. They are of average or below average intelligence, possess average or below average social skills, and may not have a nurturing environment at home. Shouldn’t we be putting our resources towards helping them? 

In fact, the PDSB is doing the exact opposite. It is cherry picking smart, motivated, articulate, and hard-working black youth and handing them extra supports to try to increase the representation by black students in university programs, meanwhile kids who are truly disadvantage (of all races) are relegated to degraded programs. 

The board used to offer basic and applied level classes for kids in grade 9 and 10. These programs were specifically designed for kids who, for whatever reason, arrived for high school without the prerequisites for high school level academic courses. The classes were small, and the curriculum designed to be approachable for these less-academic kids. Much ado was made of the fact that kids in these programs did poorly on standardized literacy and math tests. Why would you expect any different? The very reason they were in those programs in the first place is that they were achieving below the provincial standard in math and English. If they in fact did well on those standardized tests, that would be some proof that the programs were not needed.  

Most kids will not go to university, and there is nothing wrong with that. The average IQ is 100 and most people are about average when it comes to ambition and work ethic. Yes, we need engineers and brain surgeons, but we also need skilled tradespeople and a wide variety of service sector workers. But now, in the interest of “equity”, all the kids are crammed into the same large Math, English, Science, and Social Science classes under some fantasy that they are all going to university. We are talking about kids who read and do math at the grade 4 level with kids who found grade 8 reading and math boring because it was not challenging them enough. Everyone is a loser in these classes. 

So what the PDSB is actually doing with this University of Toronto Mississauga Black Student Mentorship Program is providing extra resources to kids who don’t really need them, based entirely on race, while at the same time taking away resources from kids who do (many of whom are balck). Does that sound “equitable” to you? 

The sad fact of the matter is that the PDSB does not care about providing opportunities for all students. They have created a boogie man called “systemic racism” evidenced by lower average academic achievement in one narrowly defined student group (black males) and are hell bent on killing off that boogie man by whatever means regardless of overall student achievement. If more black kids end up in university, its mission accomplished.  

I wish the best of luck to those kids in the University of Toronto Mississauga Black Student Mentorship Program. I am sure they are great kids with much to offer our society. But I do hope, that once they have achieved their goals and, through hard work and determination, become successful, that they do not fall into the trap of thinking that they only got there because they were identified as oppressed victims and given preferential treatment. They didn’t need that. But other kids needed those resources and didn’t get them. That’s the critical injustice. 

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Igor Stravinsky is an anonymous Canadian high school teacher. For more of his writing - The Peel District School Board’s New Anti-Racism Policy (substack.com)