Should Toronto's schools speak one cultural language, or many?

Culture-specific supports may help kids from communities with high dropout rates — Spanish-speakers, Somalis, or aboriginal students — but some warn of a slippery slope to segregation.

Volunteer Lina Contreras helps Guadalupe Herrera, 11, with her homework. St. Jude Catholic school has started a homework club for Spanish-speaking students, who tend to lag behind in school. About 30 students (Grades 3-7) signed up, and the program plans to expand to other schools.

By Louise Brown
Sunday, April 06, 2014

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There’s something about this new homework club that gives Guadalupe Herrera an edge. The tutors are speaking Spanish — and so are most of the kids.

It’s the latest move by a Toronto school to offer help along cultural lines.

When Guadalupe forgot the French word for rule, the Grade 6 student at St. Jude Catholic School asked her tutor for help, in Spanish. Tutor Lina Contreras replied, also in Spanish — it’s règle, like reglas, the Spanish word for rule.

Grade 5 student Amy Alvarez had tutor Juan Nunez break down science concepts in Spanish, “because sometimes I don’t know the words as well in English.” Her parents work evenings, so it helps to tackle homework before she goes home. Grade 6 student Renato Avila bragged he got 80 per cent on a math test after a few weeks of help in Spanish.

The popular new club — it has a waiting list — is part of a move by the Toronto Catholic District School Board to tackle a 21 per cent dropout rate among Hispanic students, compared with Toronto’s overall dropout rate of 14 per cent. (The Catholic board doesn’t track its own ethnic data, relying instead on the larger Toronto public board, which does.)

Research out of the University of Toronto suggests Latino students suffer in schools from racial stereotyping that pegs them as lazy, poor or even criminal. Some feel pressure to quit school to help support their families.

As Canadian educators learn more about which demographic groups struggle with learning, and why, schools are fine-tuning extra supports for specific communities. But it’s a controversial approach sometimes viewed as a step toward segregation.

Critics warn specialized programs risk splitting Canada’s diverse schools into colour-coded camps, with Portuguese tutoring, Somali mentoring, Africentric curriculum, aboriginal literacy camps and Spanish-speaking Saturday research projects. Some Somali parents protested recently when the Toronto District School Board voted to offer extra help to students of Somali background — whose dropout rate is 25 per cent — arguing that it will stigmatize their community.

“I’m not wild about organizing supports along ethno-linguistic lines, because it treats students (from one background) like they’re all the same,” said education professor Charles Ungerleider of the University of British Columbia, a leading scholar on student diversity. “To paint everyone with the same brush is not fair — and it works both ways: ‘You’re Asian, how come you’re not good at math?’”

Yet others argue that tailoring help to the needs of each group is the smartest way to bridge the gaps.
“We know students are far more successful when they can relate to the materials they’re learning, when they see themselves, and there is a way to do that without isolating and labeling,” said Jim Spyropoulos, TDSB’s executive superintendent of equity and inclusive schools.

St. Jude Principal Caroline d’Souza agrees.

“This pilot project (the homework club) has come as a blessing because there is a gap in achievement for Spanish-speaking children and parents were asking for help,” said D’Souza, whose Weston Rd. school is in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.

The board has earmarked $35,000 a year for the club, whose 33 students from Grades 3 to 7 meet twice a week after school. It is expected to move to two more schools this fall.

“For some students,” said D’Souza, “deeper comprehension comes when the ideas are translated.”

Among other new culture-coded programs:

Toronto’s public board is consulting with the Somali community on how to design a three-year plan to help students of Somali background through staff training, lesson plans that include Somalia, summer literacy programs, tutoring and mentoring.

The Catholic board has launched a case study of four elementary schools with high Portuguese populations to see if higher teacher expectations, more outreach to parents, and student help might lower a dropout rate similar to that of Spanish-speaking students.

Both boards have worked with the Working Women Community Centre to run after-school homework clubs called On Your Mark for students of Portuguese heritage, many of whose grandparents came here in the 1950s from a country where formal education was not mandatory after Grade 4. The program now also works with Spanish-speaking students, serving 300 children a year of both backgrounds;

TDSB runs summer literacy and numeracy camps in schools for some 200 aboriginal students, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Directors of Education. It started a small new alternative school with an aboriginal-focus program last fall that will move this September to Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate, where the board also will launch an entrepreneurial course for aboriginal students sponsored by the Paul Martin Foundation. It also offers Ojibwe classes at two TDSB high schools;

TDSB runs an Africentric alternative elementary school and two Africentric alternative high school programs.

The Catholic board is creating a Filipino Advisory Committee to address the challenges facing its largest group of non-English-speaking students.

In a recent study, students whose first language is Tagalog have a 15.5 per cent dropout rate, compared with 14 per cent overall.

“A lot of our parents work double shifts and only have Mondays off, which means they can’t exactly give their kids that much attention,” said committee member Tony San Juan, a retired teacher and former head of the Filipino Teachers’ Association of Canada.

“We’re hoping to organize a board-wide conference on these issues, from more Filipino role models in the curriculum to getting help for families where kids are being reunited with their parents after years apart.”

Pablo Vivanco is the program and services director for the Centre for Spanish Speaking People, which helps run the new St. Jude homework club along with a Hispanic tutoring agency called Teach2Learn.
Although many of the solutions proposed for various cultural groups are similar — mentoring, tutoring, parent outreach — he believes it helps to have mentors from the same background.

“How do you say ‘report card’ in Spanish? There are six different ways, depending on where you come from — some countries use A and Bs, others mark out of seven levels, others out of four levels,” said Vivanco, a member of the board’s Spanish-Speaking Advisory Committee. His agency has produced videos for Spanish-speaking parents to help them understand Toronto’s Catholic school system.

Canada’s award-winning mentoring program Pathways to Education has helped wrestle dropout rates to the ground in 15 of the country’s poorest communities by offering scholarships, tutoring and mentoring to entire neighborhoods — not the ethnic groups within them, said Vivian Prokop, president of Pathways Canada. Still, she noted there are different challenges when working with new immigrants, with aboriginal students and with home-grown “generational poverty.”

“The barriers to education vary based on a child’s postal code, and we don’t want to label or segregate students into ethnic groups,” said Prokop. “We offer wraparound supports — deep intervention — to the whole community.”

Jo-Ann Davis, the chair of Toronto’s Catholic board, believes you can serve specific groups without fuelling stereotypes. “We want kids to do well, and I believe cultural background is very important and has to be honoured. “We’re trying to bring those voices to the centre of the conversation, even though the practices will be different.”

Professor Carl James, who teaches urban diversity at York University’s faculty of education, said he’s not worried about giving extra help to certain ethnic groups as long as they don’t forget they’re part of a larger society.

“It might build the confidence and knowledge needed to feel more comfortable going into the larger community,” he said. “Whatever we are as a country is a combination of all of us.”

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