Well said, Brad! I just hope that teachers new to the profession hear .. I mean truly HEAR.. the voices of teachers who’ve been there. I’ve taught for 20 years and have had the same experiences. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ system would benefit the kids.

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Thanks very much for your comment, Brad. The public needs to hear from season veterans of the education system to truly understand why this is a political, not education focused issue. I am with you in feeling horrified that public officials and so called ‘experts’ in education (most of whom have spent little to no time in a classroom) are so easily jumping on this bandwagon that accuses teachers of manipulating the steaming system to oppress our most vulnerable students.

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1) Any talk about streaming being a racial issue is a LIE. I and the VAST majority of teachers that I have met and respected over my many years of teaching would stand on our heads for ANY one of our students who are trying to learn. To imply that educators stream kids into lower levels to get rid of the trash is so insulting and derogatory that I would dare anyone to stand up to me and accuse me of treating any student that I teach in some lesser way due to their situation in life.

2) I have taught Enriched grade 9, Academic grade 9 and Applied grade 9 classes for many years. My enriched classes have completed mathematics units that would shock even seasoned professionals as to the level of complexity and difficulty. My Academic classes have for the most part easily made their way through the grade 9 curriculum with strong success. My applied classes have also with much assistance made their way through the Applied curriculum. Here is the problem however. The Applied students for the most part had very genuine learning issues. Concepts that I went over and over and over with them throughout the year would slip away in a matter of weeks and have to be re-taught again. Adding and subtracting one and two digit numbers was a serious problem for these students and had to be reinforced again and again. If the Applied students were together with the Academic students then which curriculum would dominate? The Academic curriculum would be far too difficult for the Applied students and the Applied curriculum would be too easy for the Academic students. Thus, I would have to individualize for the class as to their abilities and thus stream them while they are all together. This is not me saying that students are incapable of learning, this is me saying that there are genuinely students that must be in classes tailored to their abilities in order to succeed. It has nothing to do with elitism or class definition, rather it has to do with actually helping students to succeed at their level of understanding and ability.

3) Claims have been made that students are placed in Applied classes and never can get out because they are trapped there. I work with my students at all times to bring them up to the next level and am constantly looking for signs that they may have been misplaced. That being said, in my many years of working with students at various levels, moving up rarely occurs, whereas moving down levels occurs very often. What I am saying is that in most cases, NOT ALL, that students usually are in the level of mathematics that they are capable of dealing with by the time they are in grade 9. If this leads to college instead of university, SO WHAT, that just means that these students will actually have a chance at a practical job and will be out in the world being productive and earning money, rather than being one of the numerous university educated unemployed people that our current society has no room for in the practical world. I sing the praises of college far more loudly then University for most of my students, as I want to see them successful!!!

4) Here is a tough one, MATH is HARD !!! Some students do not have an aptitude for it, others are fantastic at it. This is not a crime. ” Leave no one behind” strategies adopted by eggheads at the hallowed halls of the ministry of education have only one goal in mind. Keep students in school at all costs, until the government is no longer responsible for them. This is incompatible with excellence in education for our students.

5) Back to Basics !!! You may hear this current government, who I voted for, talk about how we are getting back to basics, blah blah blah, etc, etc,. Most documentation from them is so steeped in indigenous and now anti-black, anti ( fill in the blank ) rhetoric, that any real changes to mathematics for the good of our students are lost. MATH is MATH !!! The colour of the skin of my students, their orientation, religious affiliations, country of origin are meaningless. What is meaningful is HARD WORK and rigour. Students need practise every day from grade 1 to grade 8 on the following topics: Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide one, two three and four digit numbers. Fractions, Fractions Fractions !!! LOTS of practice !!! Word problems and how to decipher what they mean and solve them. Money, simple interest, loans, credit cards, tax, paying bills. Instead, I and my elementary school counterparts attend numerous mind numbing meetings on how to make math “Culturally Significant” for our students. REALLY !!! When I teach I am instructed to say that Sandeep goes to the store to buy naan rather than Bob goes to the store to buy milk. This is what is going to make students proficient at mathematics ???

These are some starting points; I could go on and on about this. My greatest joy in my entire career is hearing from my students who come back and say to me that you gave it your all for me so that I could be successful and it made a difference. This is what we teachers strive for.

Go ahead current government and the ones that come after you to try and politicize education to fit your horrible agendas and your need to get re-elected by a missguided public. I and the numerous dedicated colleagues that I have had the privilege to work with will do our best to circumvent your meddling in order to help our students be successful.

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Such a great idea! I often bring pertinent topics into my English classroom. Thanks for the suggestion;)

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This is completely off topic but have you considered the educational value in this thread? You have here, at very least, a conversation, but really a proper debate. If your students were to read all of the posts, could they notice the differences from what they are used to on social media? There is genuine debate with each person trying to present arguments to further their point. What is missing is the name calling, the vitriol and the demeaning nature that is insidious in social media.

You have an exercise whereby each student could write an opinion piece about which poster they think has best argued their point

I would love to see this used as a Supreme Court case. Groups of nine or so discuss and debate the value of de streaming using Premier Fords’s Logic. Then they vote, which doesn’t have to be anonymous, and quickly present their decision both for and against.

As a final piece each student can take Chief Justice Ford’s decision to cancel streaming and write either a supporting decision or a dissenting position. There are wonderful opportunities for evaluating critical thinking, logical argument assembly, reading comprehension, and writing skills.

It would also be interesting to see how your applied students respond compared to the academic stream students. Maybe other English teachers would sign on to the exercise as well. Just a thought but it seems a shame for such intelligent and well meaning discussion to go to waste, especially as it seems to be an endangered skill set.

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So many great points here. Thanks very much for adding to this conversation!

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Let’s not lose sight of the fact that streaming, or destreaming, are not the real enemies here. Both are at least symptoms of a broken system. Better stated, both are band aids, and I just happen to believe that streaming does a better job of limiting the bleeding.

The real issues lie at the start of the path, in some instances even before kindergarten. Even if we can promote mass literacy and give every child a truly equal footing with which to start, and all the same opportunities and time commitments along the way, the individual nature of each child still dictates that we would have a vastly different finished product going into grade nine. Every child learns differently. Each has strong and weak areas in learning and interests. Each child hits the milestone developmental stages at different ages. Even with all else being equal, I would argue that some form of streaming will still be necessary somewhere along the journey. The danger of removing streaming lies in the very real possibility that we will experience a greatly increased dropout rate as kids get left behind in a system that they are ill equipped in which to operate.

As much as I think streaming is good, I actually think it failed me. I wanted to go to university. So I plugged along in the A courses. (We had advanced, general, and basic). I dutifully obtained my six OAC’s. And all this to get a degree in music. None of those courses made me a better organist. For that matter, none of them made me a better cemetery grounds man, a better bus driver, or a better janitor. I would have been better served by courses that taught me budgeting and accounting for the home instead of the probability of rolling a sum total of 27 with three rolls of two dice. To be a better organist, I had to be a better academic, and those two things are not related.

By the same token the faculty of music in Toronto decided that musicians couldn’t possibly be well rounded citizens so we were forced to take one course from the arts and science syllabus each year. I chose philosophy which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in life. But I digress.

The real challenge is finding ways to get every child an equal opportunity both as they enter, and as they proceed, through the education system. Destreaming as a solution will not address that basic inadequacy.

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I agree with you regarding teachers being held accountable. I have been chastised more than once by my own teachers union for pushing accountability in my own department. After nearly two decades, I’ve come to realize that the only thing I can control is my own classroom. Unfortunately, as long as teaching is unionized we will have teachers who are sub-par, as once they are full time employees there is little to nothing anyone can do to encourage them to improve their practice. They get yearly raises regardless of their dedication to their career.

In regards to parent and community involvement in literacy, there is significant research that supports childhood literacy requires support from home, school and the community at large. Funding and maintaining literacy programming in communities is fundamental to supporting early literacy initiatives.

I am also more than aware that marginalized students can be very successful. My argument that destreaming is not a racial issue reflects this. It has to do with literacy levels. There are many marginalized students who are excellent students. Again, by stating that destreaming is not a racial issue this is what I’m trying to communicate.

When stating ‘my marginalized students’ I’m referring to students who have been in my classroom who happen to also be from the marginalized demographic – whether that be racial or socioeconomic. Interestingly, in my classroom the vast majority of marginalized students are from low socioeconomic environments. We have few visible minorities in my school, but most of them are in our Academic pathways.

In response to your final point about skill disparity, keep in mind that I’m a secondary teacher. The learning gap isn’t vast in most elementary grades until grade 6. That is when the divide truly becomes challenging. Also, please note that elementary teachers can modify curriculum for struggling students. For example, in grade 8 classroom with a large skill divide in math a teacher could have most of the class working on grade 8 curriculum, then perhaps a small group working on grade 6 expectations, and a even smaller group working on grade 3 curriculum. In secondary we do not modify curriculum. We teach grade level curriculum only and if students cannot achieve these curriculum expectations, they fail the course. This is why destreaming will be so detrimental for students who are below grade level. If they cannot achieve grade level expectations (which we already know if our data shows they are working at a grade 3 level) they will simply fail the course. The TDSB pilot project regarding destreaming has already shown increased failure rates in destreaming courses.

Again, the issue with destreaming is not students working 2-3 grades below-good teachers can bridge these students. The reality is that many current Applied level students are working at primary or junior literacy levels. They just don’t have the skills set as of yet to tackle grade 9 curriculum and it isn’t fair to put them in these circumstances. There is a significant difference between struggling with a course and literally not having the skill set to even participate in it.

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I agree with you – Literacy is an imperative aspect of learning. However, we cannot simply point fingers towards a lack of parental and community involvement for poor literacy skills. I may also argue that elementary school teachers actively contribute to this problem as well. I write this from my own personal experience. Growing up, I have seen teachers give up on my elder brother many times. The amount of extra attention he required to comprehend assignments was minimal – yet it posed a great challenge to his often apathetic teachers. Without my mother’s constant intervention, he too would have fell through the cracks. No, it was not because of growing class sizes that he did not recieve assistance, it was only because his teachers could not be bothered to put in a small amount more than they were required to. I should add that my brother had some amazing teachers – but the uncaring bunch far outnumbered them. I am sharing this story as I know that there are many pupils out there who endured the same obstacles while in the critical stages of learning. Teachers are not being held accountable. The government does not respect teachers, but, we need to stop constantly victimizing ourselves about problems WE also are very much a part of. I may not be an accredited teacher as of yet, but I understand the challenges on both sides.

Now, in response to your reply to Jeff:

“I am also going to disagree with you about Applied classes and marginalized students. I’ve found that many of my marginalized students (both socioeconomic and visual minorities) do very well in Applied courses due to an increase in their confidence and ability to do well in school.”

Marginalized students come from many different backgrounds – this is also in regards to academics. Fun fact: there are also racialized students from lower socioeconomic households who have above average literacy skills and struggle from boredom in the classroom. There are students from marginalized communities who fall into every possible learning category. We need to stop assuming that every student who is racialized or poor is a damsel in distress. They require our attention – but they should not be seen as a sob story. Also, referring to these students are “my marginalized students” is a strange look particularly coming from a white professional. Perhaps you should keep this in mind.

“What I have a problem with is putting students in a class together who are up to 10 grade levels apart (I teach English) in terms of skill set.”

Um.. This is the reality of every classroom. Should elementary school classrooms be streamed as well if this is the case? Every classroom has students with widely different abilities and experiences. There are students who breeze through with minimal assistance and those who require more help. For example, ENG4U is required for every Ontario university program (the exception may be Art schools). Some students who are incredibly talented in STEM or creative subjects may struggle with this course while students who enjoy literature will likely flourish. This is what teaching is all about. While it is challenging and should be addressed, we must continue to teach for a diverse classroom. Ceasing the process of destreaming will not prevent this from happening.

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Thanks for your comment, Steve! I’m glad you appreciated this article.

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