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Message from Education Action: TorontoWe need your help to build policies for the future of Toronto schools. Only genuine grass-roots engagement can give us the policies that will really make a difference for our children and on which we can mobilize.
Our regular policy-making meetings begin again at New College, at the University of Toronto, on the first Monday of every month, 6:30 pm, starting on October 6, 2008. The exception is the second Monday in January 2009.
We hope that these meetings (in addition to the ones we have held over the last year or so) will help us build a city-wide platform that will engage our school-community councils and which can be used to hold our trustee candidates to account in the coming election of 2010.
The topic for our first meeting is
Breaking the class/race barriers -- what will it take?
The TDSB's Student Census and the Urban Diversity Strategy has the data from TDSB's freshly published Student Census and Student Information System (SIS). They show that poor, immigrant, racialized children continue to do badly in Toronto schools. The newly announced Urban Diversity Strategy promises to do something about this situation but with few resources and minimal vision. We have a lot to talk about. Most importantly, we have to answer the question: What can we do to make things genuinely better for these kids?
Harry Smaller will be there to give us some of the history and analysis of class/race barriers that have developed in Toronto schools and David Clandfield will present a draft of Education Action: Toronto policies (developed out of community consultation) that will work to break down these barriers. The meeting will then be opened to discuss these policies and to find ways to insure that your views will be integrated into the eventual platform we produce.
Harry Smaller has been a teacher in Toronto inner-city schools for almost three decades and for the past decade has been an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. His research interests include student streaming, teachers’ work, and the ways in which schools and school systems serve to structure the experience of teachers and students. He has co-authored Stacking the Deck: The Streaming of Working-class Children in Ontario Schools and has co-edited a book on teachers’ response to neo-liberal impositions on schooling structures and processes (Teachers' Activism in the 1990s).
David Clandfield, a former school trustee, has recently retired from ten years as Principal of New College at the University of Toronto, where he championed the growth of Women’s Studies, and area studies programs on Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. He also helped found a new Equity Studies program, including courses in emerging fields such as disabilities studies, food security and the Romani diaspora in Canada. He has written widely on education issues and has a long history of policy development at both the provincial and local board level. He is co-chair of Everybody's Schools: An Education Policy Institute.
Time: 6:30-9:00 pm
Date: Monday, Oct. 6, 2008
Place: William Doo Auditorium
45 Wilcocks Street
New College, University of Toronto
Directions:
Coming south on Spadina from Bloor: 3rd stoplight - 2nd streetcar stop south of Spadina station
Coming north on Spadina from College: 2nd stoplight - 1st streetcar stop north of College
Metered parking and bike stands in the general area.
Enter by the door at the corner of Willcocks and Spadina. Go down the stairs on the left OR go straight ahead and take the FIRST elevator on the left.
Please come if you can and bring friends and neighbours who also care about this issue.
In solidarity,
George Martell and Faduma Mohamed,
Co-chairs, Education Action: Toronto