It became clear in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that the educational disruptions would not affect all students equally. Educators and researchers alike sounded the alarm: racialized and otherwise vulnerable populations were seeing worse outcomes than their white counterparts.
What are the lasting impacts of this period — and how much has changed?
Lance McCready is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and the director of its Transitional Year Programme. McCready’s research focuses on issues related to the employment, education, and health of African, Caribbean, Black, and LGBTQIA+ youth.
TVO Today speaks with McCready about the educational impacts of COVID-19, barriers to access to higher education for Black youth, and why our problems stem in part from bad or missing data.
TVO Today: You have written about the disruptive impact of COVID-19 on education in Ontario, especially on racialized and low-income students. Could you describe the past few years for these students?
Lance McCready: The main thing here is about education disruption and learning loss. There were a lot of school closures and gaps in support for students with disabilities and those with special-education needs. I think those gaps had particular impacts on Black students.
First, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s a real diversity and range of situations that Black students are facing across different contexts, cities, schoolboards. Sometimes, when we talk about Black students, we talk about them as a monolithic population. It’s important not to speak of all Black students as being from low-income backgrounds or as being specifically in the Toronto District School Board or as not being university or college bound. I’ll try to contextualize as best as possible, but it’s important not to centralize what the Black student experience is.
One thing we know is that Black students are over-represented in special-education classes and classrooms. Some families we know were able to mitigate some of that impact or intervene because they were financially able to hire private tutors or create private pods where tutors or even teachers within the school board were able to provide that additional support. But most of these pods were not made up of Black families or students.
What that meant, then, was just that a number of Black students were simply out of school. That learning loss has a really devastating impact on academic progress, which then impacts students’ ability to attain degrees, secondary-school diplomas, or even just get promoted to the next grade. Even among those who are promoted to the next grade, with learning loss, there are impacts later down the road.
There’s also the issue of schools that had large numbers of African, Caribbean, and Black students being more likely to close. That was another devastating outcome of the pandemic.
TVO Today: What accounted for that discrepancy in school closures and resource distribution?
McCready: We could speculate on some of the reasons, one of them being that the school-district administrators in charge of making those decisions felt like there weren’t enough resources for those schools to stay open. Resources in terms of teachers willing to teach, support for the families in relation to public health, PPE. Then there’s the matter of virtual education. We have a digital divide where, in our lower-income families, there may not be a computer in the home — or there may be one, but it has to be shared across multiple family members. The TDSB and some other school districts had made laptops available to families so that their kids could continue schooling, but I think the jury’s really out on the success of that program. We didn’t get definitive reports on the results, but there were a lot of anecdotal and informal reports of families not being able to actually access those computers.
Part of the issue, as a backdrop to everything, is that there’s a reluctance — perhaps an inability or a lack of resources — to collect data and really evaluate some of the strategies and outcomes of programs designed to promote equity and educational access.
TVO Today: You’ve written about the importance of understanding the adverse experiences of students that have been suspended and expelled. What sorts of approaches could help those students?
McCready: One thing I’m exploring right now is the use of family-group conferencing and other restorative practices in work with Black families who are involved in the child-welfare system. I’m very interested in circle work and forms of disciplinary action that centre the voices of Black families and youth rather than simply frameworks and sets of rules that can be doled out in very discriminatory, racist ways.
We know, for example, that a lot of exchanges between Black students and teachers can be really problematic, with the school administration taking the teacher’s side at the expense of the student. We’ve heard from Peel and other districts of really horrific situations of Black students experiencing violence in the classroom or of parents having their concerns dismissed and disrespected.
That’s why we need conflict-resolution approaches that centre the voices and experiences of Black students and Black families, solutions that allow for dialogue between aggrieved parties to come to an agreement that both parties have had the opportunity to design. That, for me, is the culturally relevant or responsive piece — it’s a process where the voices of Black students and families are equitably considered, as opposed to an administrative disciplinary process that privileges the interest of school officials.
TVO Today: I know you’ve written about the gap in access to higher education for Black students. How is the province doing in addressing this gap?
McCready: We’ve got to get a better handle on the gap itself. There have been some reports, like Carl James’s racial-equity report that used TDSB and census data to compare differences in outcome between first-, second-, and third-generation Black students. You know: who’s taking a university-level course, who’s graduating. There needs to be more research along those lines, not just for Black students, but across different ethno-racial groups. We can argue about how you disaggregate the data and which groups we look at, but I think in the name of equity we always need to be looking at our outcomes and how they may be similar or different across racial groups.
When it comes to curriculum, we’re going to have to rethink some of our approaches to teaching and teacher preparation. On the one hand, it’s important for Black students to be able to see themselves in their curriculum. But how are teachers going to be able to effectively teach this curriculum? If we’re really about promoting equity and access, we need to have new ways of thinking about teaching and learning and teacher training.
TVO Today: Is that happening?
McCready: It’s happening in pockets. OISE’s Master of Teaching program, for example, has more recently featured a Black educators’ group, and they’ve always had some sort of equity and diversity class that’s required. Folks are trying to create pathways and opportunities for Black teachers to get hired into different school boards, especially boards that do serve a larger number of Black families and youth.
In Ontario, where the majority of Black families in Canada live, school boards are more likely to have classes, support, and professional-development opportunities that are about working with Black families and youth and feature Black history and critical race perspectives that challenge anti-Black racism. I suspect that’s not the case all across Canada, in districts that don’t necessarily have a large number of Black families.
That said, even with equity-driven policies such as the provincewide mandate for Black History Month, we have to stay really diligent and watch the implementation. The TDSB had sort of a legendary equity curriculum and lessons dealing with LGBTQIA+ youth and families and activities on homophobia, disability, anti-Black racism, for example. But when I was teaching teacher-preparation classes, I asked, “Do you know where this curriculum is in your school? Or do you know where to find it online?” The majority of teacher candidates and teachers themselves said, “No, I don’t know, but I know it exists.” It’s not enough to have it; we really have to watch the implementation.
TVO Today: Are there any other provinces or jurisdictions we should be looking to that are doing a better job?
McCready: It’s widely known that the TDSB’s student census is one of the most comprehensive across Canada. So, the short answer would be, I don’t think there are a lot of other school districts that are attempting to really look at academic outcomes measured against the mental health of student populations by race, income level, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, rural versus urban. Provincially, the [Ministry] of Education does not have that as its mandate, and there’s no federal ministry of education to look at this across Canada and put out reports every year. There are basic questions that no one seems to bat an eye at that we can’t answer. I can’t tell you how many Black students are enrolled in university, and I can’t compare those numbers across provinces. There’s no common data-collection tool that all universities must use to record student-enrolment data, that then we can have public access to measure this. Isn’t that kind of crazy? To me, that’s kind of crazy.
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