Woke Supervisor Hands Back Control of the Peel District School Board

But no end in sight for obsession with race and identity as academic achievement continues to take a back seat and schools grow ever more unruly and violent

By Igor Stravinsky (anonymous Canadian high school teacher)

Preamble

The Peel District School Board has been under supervision for the past 2-and-a-half years. This means that the democratically elected trustees have been shut out and the Ministry of Education has been running the board directly during that time. On December 23, 2022, in a low-profile announcement, Supervisor Bruce Rodrigues announced that control over the PDSB was being handed back over to the trustees who had been elected earlier in the fall. 

The PDSB Supervisor’s Final Report, written by Rodrigues, is a historically revisionist and purely political document which attempts to justify devastating ideologically-based actions taken by the board over the last 2-and-a-half years and presents these actions as what was in the best interests of students, parents, and the tax-paying public (who are the ultimate owners of, and stakeholders in, the public education system). 

The PDSB has been focused on appeasing a relatively small group of self-appointed community activists, who, in this era of race essentialist, postmodern ideology (wokeism), punch well above their weight as municipal and provincial politicians alike scramble to signal their approval for wokeism, which is now ubiquitous in our institutions. A total purge of all levels of the board’s administration has ensured that anyone who questions the woke orthodoxy, which holds that people are not to be seen as individuals but rather as members of intersecting identity groups, has been pushed out. 

Doug Ford and the Ontario PC party have proven unwilling to stand up to this new brand of racism and intolerance. Doing so in the current climate does not add up for them, politically. Thus, there have been no checks and balances on PDSB operations. Opposition by parents (see a deleted delegation ) at board meetings was shut down and deleted from the record. This has been a formula for disaster. If policies cannot be questioned by parents and concerned community members, the system will certainly run off the rails regardless of the ideology and this is exactly what has happened. The PDSB has undergone what can only be described as a meltdown. Academic achievement has plummeted, and expectations of students, both in terms of academics and behavior have declined drastically. 

Basic behavioral expectations such as attendance, punctuality, politeness, and respect have been more or less discarded in many cases. There are typically no consequences for such behaviors, as schools are under tremendous pressure from the board not to discipline (see below). This has led to a kind of “wild west” mentality in which students continue to test the boundaries, and, finding none, exhibit increasingly anti-social and disruptive behaviors such as harassment, bullying, and even physical violence. In some schools, gangs of students battle over the local drug trade. 

Of course, behavioral problems quickly become academic ones, leaving the board in a quandary: Academic achievement in terms of credit accumulation and graduation rates are two of the main metrics by which the board is judged. So since woke ideology holds that any poor behaviors by students are the result of “racist” or “colonial” teaching methods and curriculum, any kind of disciplinary action would be “blaming the victim” thus is out of the question. The solution? Make it virtually impossible to fail a class. 

Exams have been banned for grades 9 and 10. This is of course asinine. It means the students will have no exam-taking experience when they arrive in senior level classes (which count towards college and university admissions). In fact, a student who has attended sporadically (or not at all) can earn the credit by doing a couple of make-up assignments at the end of the term. Even if the teacher enters a failing mark, the administration can award the credit. We have some students graduating who have learned next to nothing. 

To read the supervisors comments and Annual Equity Accountability Report Card you would have no idea the above is a daily reality in PDSB high schools. 

The Supervisor’s Opening Comments

“On June 22, 2020, the Minister of Education placed the Peel District School Board (PDSB) under supervision following a review and investigation into the board’s capacity to address serious concerns related to systemic discrimination, specifically, anti-Black racism and serious issues related to governance, leadership and human resources practices in the board.”

The concerns about “anti-black racism” were based on the PDSB data which showed that a disproportionate number of black (especially male) students were underachieving academically, attending sporadically, and facing disproportionate discipline. These statistical facts were taken as proof of “systemic racism”. No other possible explanation was even considered, and anyone who suggested there may be other factors which at least played a part in the difficulties these young black students were experiencing was deplatformed and shut down (or worse) by accusations of racism. 

The “serious issues related to governance” identified by Rodrigues arose as a result of the disconnect between the conclusions and directives of the PDSB review and the real-world situation in the schools. The senior administrative team at the time knew that racism in the schools was, at most, one part of the reason for lower achievement and higher discipline rates among black students. They knew that to address these issues would require a broad, community-based set of actions many of which would not be supported by the woke activists who blamed all the problems black students were experiencing entirely on “systemic racism”. The reluctance on the part of senior administration to blame the entire problem on racism and embrace Kendi-style “antiracism” as the antidote meant that they had to go. They were cut loose (with a reported severance package of half a million each for Director Peter Joshua and his Associate Director Mark Harmon).

“As supervisor, I have worked with board staff, the Board of Trustees, community members, students, and parents over the past 2 and ½ years to rebuild relationships and trust that had been eroded over a significant period of time. When I accepted the appointment, I assumed control over a board that lacked capacity to effectively govern in the interests of all students of the board. Administrative leadership and elected leadership lacked the capacity and, in some cases, - as noted in the Investigator’s Report - the willingness to provide the leadership required to ensure that the diversity of students and families in the PDSB was well served.”

The community activists have been well served, but no one else has. The supervisor was disconnected from any actual educational reality on the ground; he did not work out of the board offices but rather at Queen’s Park. He was an unknown ghostly presence in the board and most staff never met him or received any correspondence from him. His role appeared to be to ensure that the local activists, who were demanding the application of Critical Theory (wokeism) to board polices and procedures, were consulted by senior administration at every turn. Under Rodriguez, a major purge took place in which the majority of the senior administration, lifelong educators with a wealth of experience, were shown the door. Since these were firings without cause, this exercise not only degraded the administration, replacing these knowledgeable veterans with inexperienced, ideologically-driven neophytes, it was also very expensive. Millions were spent on severance pay and early retirement packages, which essentially amounted to paying an administrator his or her full salary while they sat at home until they reached that date at which they could retire with an unreduced pension. Of course, receiving these handouts was predicated on keeping their mouths shut about what was really going on at the board. The point is that the effect of Rodrigues' supervision was the replacement of highly experienced, traditional liberal, and relatively apolitical administrators with inexperienced, identity-obsessed followers of Kendi-style Critical Theory. As you might expect, the resulting impacts on student learning environments and teacher morale have been devastating. 

“I have also invested significant time and resources to build the capacity of the Board of Trustees (Board) to position them to govern the PDSB in a manner that is accountable, transparent, respectful, and responsive to the issues and concerns of the communities it serves….”

The only people Rodrigues was accountable to were the race-essentialist activists. He has done absolutely nothing to model respect or responsiveness to community concerns about the hostile and divided climate he has created in the schools and offices of the board, in which all white people (especially heterosexual males) are characterized as oppressors while black people and other “marginalized groups” are cast as victims. 

“While the newly elected board has begun its term of office in a productive and positive way, it is appropriate for regular updates to be sent to the minister to confirm that relationships are professional, respectful, and collaborative among the trustees and between the Board and the senior leadership team. The minister would be advised to similarly request confirmation and evidence that the Board is responding to community concerns in a respectful, timely and meaningful manner”.

It is clear from this statement, that while the board may have been handed back control of its operations, Big Brother will be watching. That means that Critical Theory will continue to govern PDSB policy as long as it remains the mainstream thinking in academia generally. And that could be a very long time.

In my next article, I will be looking at the Minister’s Binding Directions and the Progress the board has made so far in complying with them, and asking the question as to whether 2-and-a-half years in, these directives represent what is best for the students, the parents, and the general population of Peel Region. 

Finally, I will turn the Annual Equity Accountability Report Card and consider the extent to which this report card is in fact a useful tool for parents and members of the public to determine the quality of the education the PDSB is providing for our young people.  

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Thanks for reading. There are two more essays from this author which analyze the PDSB Directors final report, read the next one here - The PDSB is Back Under the Control of the Democratically Elected Trustees

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