Saturday, December 16, 2017

Escaping Toronto school system's "pipeline to prison" requires change


Imagine you’re acting as a judge, with a young person’s future in your hands, but no one trained you to be a judge.

So you do what you think might help this young person. You expel him from the school system, sending him to a special school where he can get extra attention he needs.

School trustees at disciplinary hearings have done this hundreds of times in Toronto. Many students they banish are black, and many never find their way back to regular schools.

Toronto’s public school board faces deserved anger after the news 48 per cent of students it expels are black.

(Toronto’s Catholic board dodges attention because it doesn’t collect race-based statistics, but soon it’ll have to.)

Close observers say repeat discipline offenders get caught in a “pipeline to prison.”  (more...)

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