Ideology trumps merit in Toronto schools

Commentary

As the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Despite the bad grammar, this is actually very good advice. For example, you should not take apart the engine of your car if everything is running smoothly. It’s a surefire way to create problems that weren’t there before.

Too bad the directors and trustees of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) never took this advice to heart. It might have saved them from a disaster of their own making.

Last year, for its specialized secondary schools, the TDSB to replace the merit-based admissions process with a lottery system, despite widespread opposition from parents and students.

It didn’t go well. In an ironic twist of fate, a computer error resulted in students from underrepresented groups (such as Black and Indigenous students) only being eligible for the 25 percent of places allocated to meet a diversity quota. Strangely enough, the other 75 percent of the places were not accessible to them. In other words, instead of reducing “inequality”, the new lottery system deprived students of underrepresented groups of spots that should rightfully (on merit) have been theirs.

You would think TDSB trustees and administrators would learn from this mistake. Instead, they doubled down and went into overdrive to justify their decision.

For example, the TDSB published a report, who predictably concluded that the lottery system was a good idea. What the TDSB didn’t expect was that parents would take matters into their own hands and ask Marcin Peski, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, to conduct an in-depth investigation. analysis of the methodology of this report.

Peski found that the report was full of false quotes, unattributed quotes, and plagiarized text. Not only were about 20 percent of the quotes in the report incorrect, but about half of the text was taken from other sources. Peski also concluded that the author likely used an AI program like ChatGPT to write the report. TDSB spokesman Ryan Bird tried to absolve his employer of responsibility by blaming the author. But if the TDSB is going to have a research report made and released, it bears ultimate responsibility for what it has published and distributed under its name.

Surprisingly, the TDSB had also not foreseen that its new admissions policy would lead to an increase in the number of applications and thus longer waiting listswhich it handles badly, drawing the ire of frustrated parents.

While the first admissions decisions for the next school year were made in December, waiting lists ended in February or March (depending on whether it was a secondary or elementary program). After this point, only students from the local catchment area were eligible for the waiting list. This, of course, essentially turned these specialty schools into ordinary public neighborhood schools, completely undermining their status as specialty schools.

This is what happens when ideology is more important than merit. A rigid commitment to “equality” means that many public school boards, including the TDSB, are obsessed with erasing all differences between gender and racial groups. As a result, school boards are making foolish decisions, such as abolishing merit-based admissions policies for specialty schools.

As this school year comes to a close, there is still time for TDSB administrators and administrators to reverse course. Reintroducing a merit-based admissions policy would be a positive sign that common sense can still prevail in the public education system. Ideology should not trump merit in schools.

Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.