The PDSB's black student success strategy

This strategy has resulted in lower academic achievement for everyone and contributed to unruly and unsafe schools.

The PDSB treating black students like a special class that can’t succeed without extra perks and privileges that the “white supremacist” students are not afforded.

By Igor Stravinsky (anonymous Canadian high school teacher)

Here is the PDSB’s “Black Student Success Strategy”

Framing the Strategy

“This comprehensive PDSB Black Student Success Strategy [BSSS] addresses our obligation to create an equitable, anti-racist, anti-oppressive and inclusive learning environment…” -Rashmi Swarup, Director of Education, Peel District School Board, in her opening letter. 

What does this statement really mean? It sounds positive. But the PDSB’s actions over the past few years tell a different story:

• “Equitable”, means equal average academic outcomes between black students and others in terms of every conceivable metric: Graduation rates, credit accumulation, marks, pathways (work, Vs. college, Vs. University), etc. In practice this has led to special privileges and opportunities for black students and lower academic and behavioral expectations for all students.

• “Anti-racist” means unequal deployment of resources in favor of black students, without regard to individual circumstances or needs.

• “Anti-oppressive” means denigrating or canceling the principles and ideals of the enlightenment, such as equality of opportunity, fairness, tolerance of diverse views, democracy, freedom of expression, and the scientific method, as well as presenting biased and inaccurate historical narratives which depict Europeans and Canadians of European descent as evil oppressors while others, especially Indigenous people and blacks, are depicted as helpless victims. 

• “Inclusive” means excluding anyone who does not agree with any of the above or questions its merits as a way toward a better school system or society. 

After introducing an allegory purportedly derived from the Akan tribe in Ghana there is a relatively innocuous Indigenous Land Acknowledgment Statement and then the following “African Ancestral Acknowledgement”:

We would like to acknowledge the indigenous Africans who were forcefully removed from their native land and dispersed across the new world. What we are confronted with today are the vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade… In entering a conversation about anti-Black racism, it is important to center Black children and Black families and to examine the systems that act upon them.

This sets the tone for the document- black students in Peel are victims of the slave trade and unnamed “systems that act on them”. But slavery was banned in British North America in 1834, and was made illegal in the USA in 1865- two years before Canada became a nation-state. Prior to that, blacks fled to British North America to escape slavery in the United States. Then there is the inconvenient truth that it was Black Africans who enabled the slave trade and resisted its abolition. Slavery was widespread in Africa before the transatlantic slave trade and remains so today. 

Thousands of British sailors died patrolling the Atlantic in the 19th century looking for slave ships filled with black people who had been rounded up in Africa by other blacks and sold to American slave traders. How many black people living in Canada today are the descendants of  black slave traders? The black Vs. white, victim Vs. oppressor narrative is a gross oversimplification and does not explain or illuminate the (very real) struggles against racism black people faced in Canada’s past and still experience today. Racism should be fought at every opportunity, but the non-falsifiable contention that we exist in an atmosphere of undefined “systems” of oppression simply gives the activists unchecked license to allocate power and resources to their own ends and benefits. 

BSSS Steering Committee

Who is running the BSSS? Trustees? A committee of senior PSDB administrators? A group of educators?  No, it is self-appointed, unelected community activists listed as the “We Rise Together Advisory Committee” and “Advocacy Peel”. To whom do they report? No one! They in fact are pulling all the strings at the PDSB and anyone who questions them will face dire consequences. They got most of the senior administrative team fired and had the recently departed supervisor under their thumb. Nothing seems set to change with his departure. Also on board is Trustee Cathy McDonald who is well known for her race-essentialist leanings. She considers diverting extra resources and opportunities to students entirely based on race to be “breaking down racists barriers”. 

BSSS Introduction

The race essentialist language speaks to Critical Theory, which underpins the BSSS:

In early 2022, Peel District School Board (PDSB) embarked on a review and redevelopment of its We Rise Together (WRT) Action Plan. Conducted by Turner Consulting Group, this review had the goal of strengthening and accelerating the Board’s actions for creating anti-racist learning and working environments.

Turner Consulting Group is notorious for its draconian application of Critical Theory to any organization it touches. Remember the definition of “anti-racist” (above) in this context. In practice, this means such things as offering full tuition stipends for black teachers taking additional qualification courses, then replacing much more experienced teachers with these neophytes in the schools. 

 Dismantling anti-Black racism is a priority for PDSB, and it will take the collective efforts of all members of the school community to make this vision a reality.

The PDSB has never provided any explanation of what, exactly, the racist structures are that they want to dismantle. They simply refer to any disproportionate representation by black people as evidence of it. Until every one of those disproportionalities is eradicated, we are to believe the dark hand of structural racism is still at work. Even then, constant vigilance will be needed to ensure the natural state of our society, white supremacy, does not re-establish itself. This delusional worldview will not tolerate any rational interrogation and guarantees that badly needed resources will be squandered on a bloated administration dedicated to fighting the phantom of “structural racism” in perpetuity.  

In my next article, I will be looking at the revisionist history the BSSS provides in support of its aims and objectives.

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Thanks for reading. For more PDSB analysis from this author read, Woke Supervisor Hands Back Control of the Peel District School Board

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