Poverty and Schools in Ontario

How Seven Ele­men­tary Schools Are Work­ing to Improve Education

By Pat McAdie

Poverty and Schools in Ontario will be a valu­able resource to help us bet­ter under­stand stu­dents’ lives.

The researchers – Dar­lene Ciuf­fetelli Parker from Brock Uni­ver­sity, and Joe Flessa from the Ontario Insti­tute for Stud­ies in Edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto – stud­ied 11 schools in poor neigh­bour­hoods. Their case stud­ies focus on seven of these schools and what they do every day to ensure that all stu­dents are pro­vided with the best oppor­tu­nity for suc­cess. Their research adds an Ontario per­spec­tive to the largely Amer­i­can body of knowl­edge on the impact of poverty on education.

In his fore­word Ben Levin, for­mer deputy min­is­ter of edu­ca­tion in Ontario and Man­i­toba, writes, “The exam­ples, sto­ries, and ideas in this book pro­vide much food for thought for every­one want­ing a school sys­tem that truly treats all chil­dren as deserv­ing good edu­ca­tion, no mat­ter their background.”

ETFO com­mis­sioned this research as part of a larger project, funded by the min­istry of edu­ca­tion, that looked at what teach­ers could do to improve the aca­d­e­mic chances of stu­dents liv­ing in poverty. Details of the project were high­lighted in “Poverty and Learn­ing,” a spe­cial issue of Voice pub­lished in June 2008. It is avail­able on the Voice web­site, etfovoice.ca -> back issues.

The authors describe how schools work to under­stand dif­fer­ent kinds of school suc­cess. Many focus on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. Some actively engage par­ents and fam­i­lies in their children’s edu­ca­tion. In some, teach­ers work together to help all the stu­dents in the school.

Each chap­ter focuses on one school and con­cludes with a set of ques­tions to encour­age read­ers to reflect on the issues in the con­text of their own expe­ri­ences and set­ting. Here are some examples.

• How would you describe the rela­tion­ship between your school’s goals and the goals of the school dis­trict? In what ways do they work in con­junc­tion and in what ways do they work at cross purposes?
• How might teach­ers, staff, and admin­is­tra­tors wel­come par­ents and fam­i­lies into the school build­ing, con­sid­er­ing such issues as phys­i­cal lay­out, cul­tural con­text, or lan­guage barriers?
• What is the historical/traditional con­text of your school? Can con­nec­tions be made between the history/tradition of the school and present-day pro­grams and com­mu­nity partnerships?

This inquiry approach acknowl­edges that there is no one solu­tion or strat­egy that will work for all schools, for all teach­ers, for all stu­dents: each sit­u­a­tion brings its own set of unique chal­lenges and requires its own strategies.

How­ever, there are lessons to learn across schools. The authors have iden­ti­fied five major cross-case findings.

• Teacher inquiry: “… inquiry-based approaches, which take con­text into account, mat­ter.” (p. 95)
• School lead­er­ship: “[Activ­i­ties like coor­di­nat­ing pro­fes­sional learn­ing, orga­niz­ing the school play or find­ing vol­un­teers] rep­re­sented some of the mul­ti­tude of ways that a team of edu­ca­tors and some­times par­ents had shared the lead­er­ship respon­si­bil­i­ties for ini­ti­at­ing and sus­tain­ing attempts for pos­i­tive school change.” (p. 96)
• Mak­ing com­mu­nity con­nec­tions: “All schools in our study described the impor­tance of mak­ing con­nec­tions between school and home, and between school and com­mu­nity agen­cies. Most of the schools viewed these efforts as some of their great­est chal­lenges; for no school was it easy.” (p. 96)
• School cli­mate and cul­ture: “In addi­tion to efforts to bridge the dis­tance between home and school, our case study schools were con­cerned with build­ing com­mu­nity within school walls.” (p. 99)
• • Mul­ti­ple sup­ports needed for mul­ti­ple issues: “Inter­gen­er­a­tional poverty and long his­to­ries of dis­trust and neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences with school­ing in one com­mu­nity are not the same as episodic poverty expe­ri­enced in com­mu­ni­ties expe­ri­enc­ing a sud­den eco­nomic down­turn … Our case study schools rep­re­sent this diver­sity of expe­ri­ence, and what this vari­abil­ity indi­cates is that there are mul­ti­ple places for pol­icy to inter­vene in sup­port­ive ways.” (p. 101)

What would it really involve for all of us to take the issue seri­ously? The final rec­om­men­da­tion is to every­one: “Acknowl­edge that incre­men­tal improve­ments can be impor­tant steps; improve­ments are not all or noth­ing. None of the schools we vis­ited thought they were ‘there’ yet but all could point to impor­tant suc­cesses that grew from an inten­tional focus on improv­ing learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents affected by poverty.” (p. 106)

Pat McAdie is a research offi­cer at ETFO.