![]() ![]() After months of consultation, the most clearly articulated proposal was to phase out non-academic streams, including applied-but the meeting ended up being only a little about that. The public meeting had been called to discuss the Director’s Response to the Enhancing Equity Task Force Report, a jargon-thick set of recommendations aimed at removing some of the discriminatory barriers to high achievement that Toronto students face. That means that, before many of these kids are even through puberty, options for their futures are severely curtailed: a York University study found that only 53 percent of black students in Toronto were in an academic-stream program versus 81 percent of white students and 80 percent of other racialized groups. Black, Latino, and Indigenous kids are much less likely than their white counterparts to be enrolled in university-track, “academic” classes and more likely to find themselves in the more trade-oriented “applied” classes as early as grade nine. Drop-out rates for black students are twice as high as they are for white kids. The largest school board in Canada has some large problems to solve. Of course, their presence shouldn’t have been strange, because young people and their futures were what everyone was there to talk about-sort of. ![]() Wherever they are, even in airless rooms boggy with Robert’s Rules of Order, teenagers bring with them their loping awkward energy, inappropriately beeping cell phones, and barely suppressed giggles. ![]()
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