Matthew Lau: An Ontario school board says education is inherently racist. Its own data says otherwise

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At a recent staff meeting at an elementary school in the York Region District School Board (YRDSB), a presentation reportedly asked teachers to accept that, “The institution of education is an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the ideology of white supremacy. It is not the responsibility of people with intersecting marginalized identities to prove this. I will engage in dialogue about how we dismantle the structures and systems of white supremacy rather than engage in debate about whether these lived realities exist.”

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For the sake of argument, suppose that statement is true and educational institutions in Ontario really are tools for “furthering the ideology of white supremacy.” How best could we dismantle these racist institutions? The answer is easy: school choice. In British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec — but not Ontario — the provincial governments partially fund independent schools, making them more affordable to more families. Ontario should follow suit.

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Allowing greater choice would help remedy the unfairness of Ontario’s current system, which effectively traps many families in government-run schools because those wishing to leave must pay for their children’s education twice — once through taxes, and again for independent school tuition. And if you accept the premise of the “white supremacy” presentation, expanded choice would allow many families — and tax dollars — to escape a racist system and access non-racist alternatives. This would dismantle, or at least significantly weaken, the racist institutions.

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On the other hand, what if the statement is untrue, and Ontario’s education system is actually not a tool for furthering white supremacy? In that case, parents still urgently need more school choice, so families can escape a system that engages in radical politics and wrongly tells children that the education system is racist against minorities to the benefit of the white population.

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Is the education system a tool to further white supremacy? One way to answer this question is to see whether any educational institutions have written policies or procedures that discriminate against minorities. Those who claim the system is racist have so far provided no examples.

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Famed economist Thomas Sowell has demonstrated that disparities between individuals or groups do not imply that they are being discriminated against, so differing educational outcomes do not prove or disprove that any group faces systemic discrimination. Nevertheless, a system structurally designed to benefit white people and cement their superiority would be expected to produce outcomes more favourable to white people, at the expense of minorities. The data do not support this theory.

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In December 2021, the YRDSB published statistics from the 2016/17 and 2017/18 school years, which showed that single-race white students in grades 7 and 8 were about as likely as average (i.e., within one percentage point) to meet provincial standards in reading and writing, and less likely than average to meet provincial standards in math. East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern students (on average) outperformed white students in math. And according to the YRDSB, white students were over-represented among students who received suspensions.