Juno News - ‘Systemic Racism’ in the Ontario's education system？

00:00:00.000 Are Ontario schools systematically racist? That's the claim made by the Ontario Human Rights Commission

00:00:06.260 in a report that points to things like slavery, hate crime statistics and anecdotal accounts as

00:00:13.580 proof that racism isn't just present, but it's baked into the system. But a new report by the

00:00:19.900 Aristotle Foundation says that's not quite what the data says. Today I'm joined by Matthew Lau

00:00:25.980 of the Aristotle Foundation who's challenging the OHRC's central premise. Lau's study shows

00:00:32.220 that the commission confuses individual prejudice with systemic discrimination, without actually

00:00:39.680 proving the existence of racist policies in today's schools. The real question is, if the

00:00:47.100 public system is so irredeemably racist, why not give families the freedom to leave it?

00:00:53.200 I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

00:01:06.740 Matthew, thank you for joining me today.

00:01:09.360 Oh, thanks for having me.

00:01:11.800 I was just telling you how much I appreciate the study that you did for the Aristotle Foundation.

00:01:18.440 And it was something that I was actually looking at, I believe it came out in March around

00:01:24.200 then of last year. And it was a report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission called Dreams

00:01:29.720 Delayed, which claimed that the Ontario schooling system was rife with systemic racism with all

00:01:38.360 these incidents. But perhaps we could start by explaining to the audience, what is the Dreams

00:01:45.160 Delayed Report? So the Dreams Delayed Report was a report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission,

00:01:53.240 which is a provincial government agency. And it's essentially their action plan for addressing

00:01:58.840 what they call a systemic anti-black racism and discrimination in the public school system.

00:02:05.160 So according to the action plan, you know, there's, you know, laws and policies and practices in the

00:02:12.160 school system that perpetuate prejudices or stereotypes or other forms of discrimination against black

00:02:18.240 people. So that was really, you know, the claim when I saw it that I found didn't sit right with me.

00:02:27.320 And I wanted to examine whether there was evidence for this very significant claim that they're making

00:02:33.960 about the education system.

00:02:35.400 You quoted some bits from the report that I'm just going to read out to you again, because I think

00:02:43.000 they're interesting that they tell a lot about this report and where it's coming from.

00:02:47.480 It says that the OHRC posits that anti-black racism is rooted in European colonialism and the transatlantic

00:02:55.960 slave trade that led to systemic anti-black racism being embedded in power structures in Canada,

00:03:02.600 which perpetuate advantages for people of European descent, and that this is translated into the

00:03:10.280 curriculum, which is focused exclusively on European history. And in your study, you go over a little

00:03:17.880 bit about the slave trade and how that's affected Canada.

00:03:20.920 Yeah. So there's a few pieces here. First, you know, it is true that historically we did have slavery in Canada,

00:03:29.480 but thankfully laws that tried to restrict slavery were passed in Canada as early as 1793,

00:03:37.560 and by 1834 slavery was outright abolished in Canada. So it is a historical fact that we had slavery in

00:03:45.160 Canada as to the degree to which it might have effects on society today is, you know, rather harder to draw

00:03:54.600 a connection given how long ago it was. And if you look at historical slavery in Canada, you know, it

00:04:00.120 amounted to, across several centuries, at most 7,500 people, of which most of them were in New France,

00:04:08.920 and about 35% of those slaves were black. So again, it is true that we had historical slavery in Canada, but,

00:04:18.840 you know, several thousand people 200 years ago is bad, but I don't think that it has anything

00:04:27.720 connected to the education system or society today. So that's really the point I wanted to draw out

00:04:33.400 about the racism, systemic racism in schools. I don't think it has anything to do with historical slavery.

00:04:41.000 Who were the rest of the slaves, if they were only 35% black? I guess there was Indigenous and possibly

00:04:45.720 There were Indigenous Canadians, yeah.

00:04:47.960 Yeah. And one of the elements that you talk about is hate crimes, because that comes up a lot when we

00:04:56.920 talk about systemic racism. And in your report, you were talking about how disparities, or sorry, how

00:05:05.560 hate crimes are affecting the black community, and comparing that to maybe some other groups.

00:05:15.240 Exactly. So if you look at the past decade of hate crimes, it's, and this is police reported hate

00:05:21.080 crimes. This is the Statistics Canada data set. And, you know, it's been trending up for many groups,

00:05:28.680 um, uh, including black people, the Jewish population. And if you look at, uh, uh, uh,

00:05:34.920 police reported hate crimes as a whole, it is up very significantly in the past decade. But, you know,

00:05:40.440 the, the Ontario Human Rights Commission tried to say, well, it was up a certain percentage year over year,

00:05:47.240 for the black community. And, you know, it, it sometimes goes up, and it sometimes goes down. And, and overall, the,

00:05:53.640 while the, um, the long term trend is up, it's up for all groups. So, you know, I don't think there's

00:05:59.160 anything in particular about, uh, hate crimes against, uh, a black community that is evidence

00:06:05.080 of systemic racism, certainly not, uh, uh, to do with the education system, right? Um, hate crimes tend to be

00:06:12.920 individual acts, right? Somebody goes out and commits a crime, uh, because they hate people of a certain

00:06:18.840 identifiable group. That's very different from systemic racism, which has to do with the policies

00:06:25.080 or procedures of an institution. Maybe we could dig into that a little bit, because we're talking

00:06:31.400 about systemic racism and hate crimes and slavery and all this stuff. But maybe we could define a

00:06:36.040 little bit more what systemic racism is, because a lot of times when people think about racism, they're

00:06:41.320 thinking about maybe somebody, uh, having a bigoted opinion of a racial minority.

00:06:49.560 Yeah. So if somebody has a, a, you know, bigoted opinion of a minority group,

00:06:54.680 that is an, you know, an individual act or an individual feeling of racism. Systemic racism really

00:07:00.600 means when it's the rules or policies or procedures of an institution. So for example, the Human Rights

00:07:06.520 Commission gave some examples of, you know, people were called racial slurs. Um, and, and those are

00:07:13.480 examples of individual racism, no doubt they are bad and we should try to curtail them. But that's very

00:07:18.760 different, say from a school board having a policy that discriminates against black people. Those are two

00:07:25.480 very different things. Yeah. So for, for systemic discrimination, if we, if you're trying to eliminate

00:07:33.560 systemic discrimination, what you're trying to do is that you are trying to, and correct me if I'm

00:07:37.720 wrong, you're trying to reshape a system towards something different, right? So with the Ontario

00:07:42.440 Human Rights Commission, the goal of, of, I guess, disrupting and dismantling systemic racism

00:07:48.120 is to reshape the system towards something else. Now, what that something else is, we can maybe dig into

00:07:55.160 a little bit because with schools, one of the things that they do through surveys and through data

00:08:00.680 collection is they look at disparities. So disparities between, uh, different categories,

00:08:06.600 right? So is, is one group, uh, achieving lower grades than another group. And what tends to happen

00:08:14.280 is that if there's a difference between those groups, uh, say maybe boys are not achieving as well

00:08:21.880 in, in literacy than girls, for whatever reason, then that would be saying that the boys are being

00:08:27.000 systemically discriminated against because their group is not achieving as much. So is that, is that,

00:08:31.880 is that a fair assessment of disparities?

00:08:37.000 Well, the, we have to, uh, uh, draw a difference between, uh, disparities and discrimination,

00:08:43.480 right? So just because there are disparities between group doesn't mean that there's any

00:08:47.960 systemic discrimination. The, the example I always like to give is that, uh, if you look at, uh,

00:08:53.880 life expectancies in Canada over the past century, the life expectancies for women is, is much longer

00:09:00.840 than it is for men. Um, about a hundred years ago, women tended to live about two years longer than men.

00:09:07.000 If you look at 50 years ago, the life expectancy at birth for women was about seven years longer than

00:09:12.040 it was for men. And now it's back down to about four. So if you, if we wanted to tell a story about

00:09:18.520 these differences are all due to discrimination, we would have to say that, uh, Canadian society has

00:09:25.160 discriminated against men for a hundred years and that the discrimination was, uh, increasing in its

00:09:32.040 severity, uh, from approximately 1920 to 1970. And since 1970, it's been decreasing in severity. Well,

00:09:40.600 I don't see any evidence of that. I don't think it's because of, you know, systemic discrimination that

00:09:45.560 there's disparities in life expectancy. And it, it, I would apply, you know, the same logic to the school

00:09:51.480 system or to, um, many other outcomes that we see. Um, just because two different groups are achieving

00:09:57.960 different things doesn't mean that the system is biased or discriminates against, uh, one group or the

00:10:03.640 other. So this is why I use that example, the boys and the girls, because, uh, we don't often hear that men are

00:10:09.960 being discriminated against. We typically hear that especially so-called white men, uh, at the top of

00:10:18.120 the chain of in privilege and so on, so forth. So I kind of, I'm glad you brought up that example as well,

00:10:23.240 because what we're hearing is that, uh, certain groups are being discriminated, discriminated against

00:10:28.840 in school because there's disparities between certain groups. Uh, and that's a narrative that is, uh, well

00:10:34.360 absorbed by most people as well as it's assumed by most people. But, uh, I think it would be interesting

00:10:40.920 to take us through some of the data that you looked at from data collection in the schools themselves.

00:10:46.840 So this is the data that the schools are collecting about these different groups.

00:10:52.920 Right. So the, the purpose of the, um, the collection of the data was really to evaluate this claim,

00:11:00.360 um, that the human rights commission made that people of European descent, uh, have, are, uh,

00:11:06.120 you know, unfairly advantaged in the school system because, uh, of the, the way the curriculum is formed

00:11:11.800 or, or instruction or, or for any other reason. Right. So we looked, for example, the Peel district

00:11:17.400 school board has published very recent data on this and, um, as to how their students perform on EQAO

00:11:24.360 tests, EQAO is, is the provincial agency that, uh, issues standardized tests. And what we find is that

00:11:31.400 the, the highest performing groups are Southeast Asian and South Asian and East Asian students,

00:11:37.240 um, to outperform the white students actually in the Peel district school board. Um, again, we looked,

00:11:44.360 uh, there was another school board that published data. This was the Waterloo Catholic, uh, district school

00:11:49.880 board. And again, it was the, the East and Southeast Asian and the South Asian students who had on

00:11:56.840 average the highest performance on EQAO tests. So when we see this data, it does not jive with this,

00:12:06.280 uh, narrative that the human rights commission is putting out that it's, it's people of European descent

00:12:11.080 who are, uh, unfairly advantaged by the school system. Well, if, if the Asian kids are, are, 0.98

00:12:16.920 you know, scoring the highest on tests doesn't make sense. And so, uh, if we go back to the

00:12:24.840 Human Rights Commission reports, uh, do they, do they give any other reasons for disparities?

00:12:33.560 Well, they don't try to look at, uh, I, I think it was beyond the scope of their report,

00:12:38.920 um, as to why, uh, different groups might achieve different things. The report was not

00:12:45.160 really a dig into disparities. It was a, it kind of assumed that, well, there's systemic discrimination

00:12:52.120 and now we have to tackle it. And, uh, it, it held up the disparities as proof of, of the, uh,

00:12:58.920 systemic discrimination. But to me, it's, it, it's, uh, very flimsy. Yeah, but I, I guess that,

00:13:05.000 that's why I was asking, because if we're told all the time that there's systemic discrimination in

00:13:10.120 schools that black people are the most discriminated against, although there's some other

00:13:15.640 groups that get mentions, uh, quite frequently. And then when you look at the data, it's, it,

00:13:20.760 it's not necessarily always the case that this is, uh, what's going on. And so what other reasons might

00:13:26.840 be, uh, behind why there are differences between groups? And I'm not seeing that in a lot of the

00:13:32.360 official documentation from, you would expect the Ontario Human Rights Commission,

00:13:37.080 an official body that has a lot of influence to have some of that information. And I haven't seen

00:13:42.200 it. I don't know if you have. Well, there are, there are many different reasons why people achieve

00:13:48.120 different outcomes, right? It's, it's, some of them are cultural differences. So for example,

00:13:53.080 and I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for one group or the other, but, um, some cultures may,

00:13:58.520 uh, emphasize playing music or playing sports as opposed to academic performance. They, there's,

00:14:06.040 you know, um, family income and, and the, the level of education that your parents attained,

00:14:11.960 uh, would, would be, uh, you know, play a big role into, into the, uh, the educational achievement

00:14:17.160 of students. So there, you know, there are many different factors and, and just saying,

00:14:21.000 well, it's because of racism in schools and systemic racism to me, um, that, that doesn't make much sense

00:14:27.160 at all. Yeah. And one of the things that you, that you do bring up is the difference between the

00:14:34.680 individual, uh, instances of racism. And so that might be, uh, back to some kind of bigotry, right?

00:14:41.960 Or so the, the, there's a negative, um, stereotype, maybe there's a comment or the,

00:14:47.880 these individual instances, uh, between students or maybe between teachers and things,

00:14:53.160 so on and so forth within a school, which is very, very different from the systemic racism,

00:14:57.160 this idea that the, the, the way that policies and rules and curriculum are developed are developed

00:15:04.040 specifically to elevate a particular racial group, right? So that is one thing that you bring up in

00:15:11.000 the report, but what, what might be some recommendations then to improve that? Because right now,

00:15:17.560 what I'm seeing with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, this particular dreams delay,

00:15:21.240 and also has a compendium of recommendations that there's a few things that are attached to this.

00:15:26.440 And the compendium of recommendations are largely from community groups, but they, they are, some of

00:15:33.240 them are completely wild what they're asking for on the basis of this systemic discrimination that can't

00:15:38.840 be found in the data. Um, but it's being used by many different groups to ask for things like removing

00:15:45.640 police officers from schools, right? Well, we know that violence incidents are going up. Um,

00:15:50.760 and so what, what, what would be the recommendations? How, how can we address this situation? Because

00:15:56.120 we're dealing with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which many, many, many people just take at face value.

00:16:02.760 Yeah. As you say, the Ontario Human Rights Commission gave a very long list of recommendations,

00:16:08.680 uh, most of which I don't remember, but included things like, um, you know, having, uh, teachers,

00:16:14.760 colleges, uh, recruit based on some diversity targets, for example, and, you know, a whole host of,

00:16:21.480 you know, uh, diversity training and, and these types of recommendations. Um, the, the recommendation

00:16:29.400 or the, or the policy that I would prefer and that I have long supported for the education system is,

00:16:34.840 um, if there's something wrong with, uh, the government run education system, the public education

00:16:41.320 system, uh, Ontario should, as other provinces currently do, provide more support for parents

00:16:48.440 who want to access alternatives to the public school system. So, for example, in Alberta and BC and some

00:16:55.800 other provinces, if your, uh, if, if a family decides that a private school or another type of school

00:17:03.320 is best suited for their child, they can send their child there and, and some of the taxes that they

00:17:08.280 pay will go and be used to fund that education. Right now in Ontario, uh, there's no such option.

00:17:15.000 If you want to send your child to a different school, whether it's because you think your school

00:17:19.640 is racist or the teachers are not giving proper instruction or the academics are no good or for

00:17:25.160 whatever reason, if you want to send your kids to another school, you have to pay twice. First,

00:17:31.480 in taxes for the school that your kid doesn't go to. And then second, uh, for the tuition,

00:17:37.160 for the private school that you do want to send your kid to, right? If you're paying taxes,

00:17:41.560 we're all paying taxes to educate the kids. To me, if the parents decide to send the kids

00:17:45.800 somewhere else, they should still get that tax money to educate their kids. 1.00

00:17:49.960 Yeah. You raise a really, really good point there because some of the loudest people calling schools

00:17:54.760 systemically racist or claiming, uh, all of this, uh, the, these attacks on, on marginalized groups

00:18:02.040 tend to be the people who are very much against different forms of education. So whether that be

00:18:07.160 a charter school or just any part, part homeschooling, whatever it is, these tend to be the people who

00:18:13.080 are against this the most, it does raise the question. If, if schools are so systemically

00:18:16.040 racist, if they're so rotten, why can't we give parents different options to access,

00:18:21.880 uh, and maybe a non-racist or a better education system?

00:18:25.480 Other provinces do this. And you mentioned charter schools and in Alberta, they do have

00:18:30.840 something like a dozen charter schools, which even though they're, uh, government funded,

00:18:35.960 they're autonomously run. And, uh, those charter schools have very long waiting lists because

00:18:41.720 parents are, are banging on the doors to get in. Yeah, that's great. Well, perhaps we'll see

00:18:48.280 something like that pop up. Uh, I think choice is always interesting. I think some unions might be

00:18:54.920 against that, but, uh, it would certainly be interesting to bring that to Ontario.

00:19:00.120 Uh, Matthew, I appreciate the discussion so much and I appreciate the report so much and you should

00:19:04.760 all go read it. Thank you very much. And there you have it. The systemic discrimination that we're

00:19:09.880 told about isn't easily seen in the data and yet important organizations, uh, influential organizations

00:19:17.880 like the Ontario Human Rights Commission are getting their information from somewhere. But it seems

00:19:24.040 these days we're not so much relying on evidence, we're relying on activism. If you liked today's show,

00:19:32.760 I would love to hear your experiences with systemic discrimination in schools or the claims thereof.

00:19:39.160 And if you liked this show, please like subscribe and share with other people. I'll see you in the next one.

Juno News - October 10, 2025

‘Systemic Racism’ in the Ontario's education system？

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