 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinitha Srivastava. So this idea of resilience, we use that and they become trapped in that idea because they can come back. So there is that fear I have about resilience and not enabling the policies and processes we have to make the possible for them to be successful. In this episode, we're going to explore the impact of systemic racism within the school system. Even before COVID, education advocates were sounding the alarm about the future of racialized children in our schools. They said unequal education opportunities and deep-seated systemic racism were holding children back. Our guests today are longtime educators who say the pandemic has only deepened the divide. Carl James is a professor of education at York University and a former advisor to the Ontario Minister of Education. And Kulsum Anwar is a high school teacher who works out of one of Toronto's most marginalized neighborhoods. I spoke to them both at the start of the school year about the injustices within the education system and how we might make small changes that could have a rippling effect in our communities. So both of you, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this very important issue. Carl James, in your last article, you wrote something for us, so you quoted some researchers that have called public schools racist sorting machines. What does this mean when you say racist sorting machines? We have to think of school as one of the major institutions that enables possibilities and opportunities for young people and for Canadians generally. So schools play a significant role. How race comes into this? Because I think race matters in our Canadian society and based on race, we have certain kinds of assumptions about the background of people who will do well and who will not do well, who have the possibilities of becoming a good student, a good math student, or who will be able to become the athlete in the school. And those kinds of things follow students and race is one of those factors that we might use in order to determine those possibilities. And therefore schools play a significant role. As we know it today, unless we change things, unless we start becoming much more equitable and pay attention to equity, then we are going to continue to sort it. So let me just pause for a minute because I feel like, well, you know, you said, well, we've got these systems in place in Canada, multiracial society, multicultural, everything. We're supposed to trust our institutions. And I mean, we have a teacher with us today. We're supposed to trust our teachers to treat all of our students equally and to equally help children move through the system. So Kulsum, you're a teacher. What's your response to this? So as much as we want schools to be these equitable places, they absolutely aren't. And all of that sorting happens. And the evidence for that is in front of our eyes. I teach English and it's a compulsory course. And I teach grade 12 University English, which is, you know, every student who wants to go to university has to take that course. And I can tell you very plainly that you won't see black students, particularly black male students in those courses. So we don't need any convincing about whether the schools are sorting or not. It's happening. For those of us who don't know or for folks who might be listening that don't know, can you describe your neighborhood for us, your community? Yeah. So Jane and Finch is probably the largest immigrant reception center you're going to find in maybe Canada. So there's a lot of diversity here, a lot of new Canadians. And it's very racialized to the point where our school has very few white students. I would say the demographics are the biggest group would be black. We have Guyanese students, Vietnamese students, very multiracial. But it is a low income community. And it's grappled with negative perceptions that come along with societies disdain for the economically and racially marginalized. What could we say to somebody who says, for example, well, this is not the school's fault. The schools are not the sorting machines. It is economics and it is just society. Kids are already sorted before they come to school. Of course, it's not just school. What is the message that that child at age four of three is getting from the larger society? How do the media present the images of racialized people? In all this discussion of COVID, for example, do we present black people as being experts in the medical area to talk to one of the issues? Do we present racialized professionals or indigenous professionals as being able to tell us how to work with our children in the school system? So it's not just the parents or the school, it's the society. And the more we can start thinking about the system and not just the school, but the school in relation to the media, in relation to politicians and the policies they make in relation to the justice system, if we see all this and we think that children are not just getting messages from school, we can do our best in schools to make the child feel welcome and inclusive, et cetera, et cetera. But when that child goes into the larger society and what the messages they're getting in school is now reinforced, then the teacher might become suspect and especially if it's a racialized teacher, it might be all about the teacher and not about reality. So yes, we have to think of it's more than school. So I agree with you. At the same time, though, the school become complicit insofar it doesn't challenge that which is the child is getting from the larger society. We've had some worldwide protests against systemic racism. And in response, I would say we've had some changes here in Ontario and in Canada, local school boards are starting to realize that they may need to run some anti-racism education. Kulsum, how is that going? Change is supposed to be coming. So how is that change going? Yeah, I mean, certainly there's been response to the recent global protests, but efforts at equity and anti-racism training have been going on for years. I've been teaching for almost 15 years and it's remarkable how little has changed in those 15 years. Professional development that's focused on equity continues to be really tense. There's a lot of teachers who are on board and really seeking to learn, but there's a lot of resistance as well. And we continue to hear from teachers who are certain that all they are doing is making objective decisions about the ability of the child and that they do not see color and that these issues are not systemic. Because if you admit to a systemic oppressions, first of all, it's really uncomfortable to realize that we represent the system that does these things. It also means that we have to confront privilege we may have. It means that our understanding of our self may not include our sense of our own biases, so it's uncomfortable. So there's a lot of resistance and that does impact students. So on a personal level for you as a racialized teacher, do you find these helpful? Do you find maybe not on a systemic level, but say in your own school, do you find that these anti-racist trainings, do you find them helpful? I see some progress. I think they're necessary. I don't think that they are not any kind of panacea. They don't instantly work, but there's going to be no progress if we don't have these conversations. And I've seen some progress and also very little progress. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's both. I agree that there's some progress. But I'm not a fan of training on one level. Having the conversation, as Colesum said, is absolutely, absolutely critical. And all of us, even the racialized teacher and the black teacher, all part of a system that he or she has to implement, the testing, etc. So we're all a part of this. And therefore we have to constantly remind ourselves that on one hand, we're having to challenge inequity at the same time we produce that inequity. But it's for us to think how we're going to try not to reproduce that inequity. And that's work. That's work for all teachers and for racialized teachers as well. But training though, sometimes I feel training puts the issue in, is the teacher not teaching good enough, is the curriculum, it's about the teacher. And yes, the teacher is implicated in it. But it's more the system, how the curriculum has been set and how it reproduces inequity, how the system of grading that comes from above, how the EQA that we expect students to respond to. If we don't spend the time looking at that and paying attention to that, but just talking about our individual attitude and racism is reproducing this thing, then we're not going to go anywhere. And if we get people to think about, it's about them. And then people might spend their time trying to shield themselves from that which they have been living with. And therefore never get to the system looking at the policies, the program and the legislation that reproduces the system. So Carl, I mean, I hear what you're saying. You're calling for wholesale change. So I'm wondering, it's taken us so long to get to this point. So how do we start to undo this? I think the conversations as comes from said that we all have to have. Within that conversation, we have to also think about how we are all implicated in a system of inequity. I always think that it's not just an English teacher that brings biases to the work that he or she does. It's not just the social science teacher, etc., etc. It's not just a sociology teacher that has these biases. None of these are neutral. Science also has all these biases that bring. Let's admit that these structures inform the very questions that we ask, the references we make, or the examples we bring up in our curriculum. That has something to do with the experiences that as a person, you bring to teaching, you bring to the understanding. And that's what needs to happen. How we are all informed by an institution that's informed by the society that produce certain kinds of ideas that we have and we work with. All right, Carl, I keep thinking about what you're saying, that you don't think anti-racist training works. But in some ways, what we're hearing from Kulsom on the ground is that the teachers, even in early education years, are streaming students, like as early as kindergarten. How do you think parents can help? Parents can, especially privileged parents, like I am, like we are, we need to, as parents, support diverse multicultural neighborhood schools. We need to divest from optional attendance. We need to stop shopping for high schools that are going to position our children in a way that's going to enrich them somehow. We should be supporting public education for all, a standard of education that is uniform for all. I know these specialized programs in high schools are really popular with parents. And I'm a parent, they seem attractive. It's going to expose my child, prepare my child for a particular career or open their horizons. But what happens is a lot of schools are abandoned and streamed because you have the, quote, unquote, strongest students leaving the neighborhood. No, I mean, that's a very interesting. What you're saying is this idea of strongest children leaving the neighborhood, right? That's the system of the charter system in the US or the, you know, you get those special tickets to get out of your neighborhood to go into a different school. Yes, that happens in our neighborhood. All the same. Right. Yeah, I, and how this is a really challenging question to me too, because I'm also a parent and the question really is how can we convince ourselves that, you know, how can we convince each other to participate in this and what you're saying, which is support public education, but also to start thinking more collectively. You know, I always remember having this discussion with a colleague in Sweden. And she said to me, you know, this is not a dress rehearsal for my child. This is it. So no matter what we want our children in those communities, in those schools getting the kind of education that will enable that child to live the fullest life possible to realize their potential and for us as parents to work and do the best and expect the best for our children. What we can do then is expect and think that all parents would want the same thing for their children. All parents are working to do that exact thing for their children and they're just like me. Now, then we have to look at our privilege. Of course, we're not going to want to send our children to a school that would not have the best science lab, the best gym, the best opportunities. We're going to want that for our children. Therefore, we should also think that those parents on the road want the same thing. And therefore, we're going to have to do some work with convincing education administrators, the policymakers, the politicians. We're going to have to do the work to enforce that university people as well become employed and make this a bigger issue and not just simply my child. And so we can only do what we can because we want the best for our children. But we can insist that the system, as it is, respond to everyone in a way that helps all children to maximize their potential. And I would argue that that is in the best interest of our children. You know, when we support a system that is equitable and there's high expectations for all, that serves our children, too, and the society that they're going to go on to be part of. Absolutely. I like the idea itself, the society. Because if all children are able to realize their potential, and you can imagine how much money we would not have to put in prisons, how much money we would not have to put into the health care system because of the mental illness, because of not being able to understand the appropriate use of medicine. So all of us benefit because we can now live the lives where we do not have to think about fear. We do not have to think of security because everybody is realizing the kinds of opportunities and potentials that they have. Everybody benefits. I mean, Carl, you've been talking about this for at least 20 years. You talked about the Stephen Lewis report. You said that, you know, there's been report after report that has indicated the same thing, including many of your own reports that you've written, that these schools are anti-black, they're anti-indigenous, they're systemically racist. And what I'm wondering is what, of all the 20 years we've been talking about, we have reached this crisis, now we're in the middle of COVID-19, which just simply exacerbates all of these things that you've been reading about and talking about and called Zoom for you, living it day to day. We've reached the red alert and urgent situation now and we all want the same thing for our children. What are some of the things that we can do now to start pushing this ideal that you speak about? I'm thinking here of COVID that has exacerbated the problem. And children are not going to go to school. Some children are going to stay home. We know that certain groups of parents will be able to hire a teacher to spend five hours with their children and bring the lessons to them and those children can advance. And I keep thinking about the last six months or five months of children have not been having the necessary support or education possible. And we know that researchers shows that some students, especially students from lower income households, after the summer they fall back in the education of what's going on. So you can imagine how much of this, how much of education, especially for low income people are going to be exacerbated by COVID. And how do you tell the parents not to hire the teacher that advances children? And what do we do for those students who are not going to advance? And if we have not been paying attention to equity or really doing the job that we need with those students who need the extra support all along, what's going to happen after COVID? And how do you feel about this, Kulsum? How do you keep your own, we talked about the sphere of influence. You said you had a little, how do you keep it up? You've been doing this for 15 years, you know, every day. You grew up in this neighborhood, you teach in this neighborhood. The way to keep going is, as you say, is to recognize that you have impact every day. And I would say that teachers in neighborhoods like ours have more influence and power in the lives of students and in more privileged neighborhoods. And what that means is, you know, you can have a greater impact with your, you know, your commitment to students and commitment to high expectations for those students. So, you know, obviously with COVID, all of the inequities that were already in place are just going to be exacerbated by the issues that Carl just talked about. The way to deal with that is certainly to show up and it's also to examine what you're doing because a lot of, you know, the standards that we're so desperate for these students to meet, some of those standards are just problematic in the first place. So, you know, we need to question everything we're doing to be an anti-racist educator, to be the educator we need at this moment is to be never complacent and just really, really questioning the way we're doing things. We should be, you know, we should embrace the discomfort and, you know, just be uncomfortable because things are uncomfortable, our students are uncomfortable. I like the point that some of this has to do with uncomfortability that we're going to have to work with and I would add to what Kulsumja said, it's not just the high school teacher and the high school students and the whole area of high school. What the university is doing, you know, to also change the context, the messages that go in our, about possibilities for students. Who are the students who are getting into university and how university enabling their success as well. So it's, we have to think about this at all levels of the education system. Carl, I'm so curious. You've been doing this for a long time and education is absolutely the idea of education as an equalizer in society is, it's very clear that you're very passionate about it. I'm wondering, how do you keep yourself going? You know, and how, yeah. Go ahead. Hope becomes cruel if we do not also think about how these things that we construct as hope also have some built-in inequities that might make it difficult us to traverse. And so I am holding on to that idea of thinking about the possibilities, but at the same time, don't want to see how the hope can be cruel without, without putting the structural changes in place to make whatever students have or what students want for their lives possible. I'm going to stop because that was just beautiful. It's what Carl was talking about with the cruelty of hope is very much in some ways what I was trying to say about this idea of stop calling me resilient, this idea that... You know, a recent study about black students talked about 93 or some high percentage of black students very early thought that they would want to go to university and only about 60 or 61% of them thought they would eventually get and get a university degree. For the rest of the population, about 80% of the 82 or 87% of them said they would go to university and 78% thought that they would actually do so, you know. So aspirations of the larger society of going to university was high and they eventually thought they would, but the black students did not have that possibility of going. And in that same report, we also talk about the resilience of black students, how much they all felt that they can come back after having difficulty, they can work hard, they can survive, they can... And so the resilience of black students was seen as much higher in the statistics called when they asked those questions of whites and others, they did not have as much quote-quote resilience as a black student. So this idea of resilience, this idea of being able to confront the issues and become better is something that is talked about for racialized students and minoritized students and others. But we use that and they become trapped in that idea of their resilience because they can come back no matter what we do. So the system never moves to make possibilities because the system can remain the same and their resilience will be able to bring them back to what they were. And so there is that fear I have about resilience and the cruelty of thinking about that group as resilient and not enabling them, not enabling the policies and processes we have to change to make the possible for them to be successful. And so this is my fear about the trust of resilience. Sorry, the last thing that you said, the what, the trust of resilience or the trust of resilience? Yeah, the trust in, the trust, the thinking that resilient, you know, they're resilient so it will always come back and that's okay. Yeah, it will always be fine no matter what you throw at us. The poison water is fine, we'll just boil it. We're resilient. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How about you, Colson, you wanted to say something about resilience too. Yeah, I would agree with Carl. I also think it's, you know, it's, it's patronizing, you know, the discussion of resilience because it's just, yeah, exactly. It's an attempt to absolve the system, absolve ourselves of responsibility. Yeah, and place the, you know, to reinvigorate the idea of meritocracy and that, you know, the students just try hard enough they can make it or they can make it, you know, in a way that's best for them. I hear a lot of like, well, you know, maybe, maybe the reason we don't see the representation is, you know, students, there's nothing wrong with the college stream. There's nothing wrong with the trades. And of course, those things are true. And when you bring up, there's not, nobody's ever said anything was wrong with any of those things, but it seems to be the right answer only for some children. And that, you know, there's, you know, so it's like, you know, wanting what's best for black students within reason, you know, like, so, and that is what, you know, so resilience is part and parcel of those low expectations because it's essentially just a way to gloss over ongoing inequities and our role in them. I agree. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. Thanks for listening. If you want to continue the conversation on education, hit me up on Twitter at rightvenita. That's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A and at ConversationCA. And use the hashtag Don't Call Me Resilient. If you'd like to read more about systemic racism in education, go to theconversation.com. It's where you'll find our show notes with links to stories and research connected to our conversation with Carl James and Kulsum Anwar. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced with a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our producers are Nahid Buwi, Nihal Elhadi, and Vicky Mochama with additional editorial help from our intern, Ibrahim Dyer. Reza Dyer is our technical producer and sound guru. Anua Quarku is in charge of marketing and production design. Lisa Verano is our audience development editor and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. Special thanks also to Jennifer Morose for her indispensable help on this project. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. Thanks for listening everyone and hope you join us again. Until next time, I am Vinita and please don't call me resilient. I'm Vinita from Something in the Water.