Thursday, May 22, 2008

Toronto's public school board has voted to open an Afrocentric alternative school in September 2009

The junior kindergarten to Grade 5 school – believed to be a first in Canada – is expected to help tackle a 40% dropout rate among black students. Approved by a 13-8 vote after a heated debate in which one trustee called another a racist, the school will be located in an empty wing of Sheppard Public School on Sheppard Ave. W. near Keele St. The board also voted to study the feasibility of opening an Afrocentric high school in the future, but rejected a proposal to do so by September 2010, a timeline trustee Irene Atkinson called "absurdly" short. The Afrocentric grade school will seek to hire a number of black teachers and use a more global, less Europe-focused curriculum to engage more students of color. It will be open to children of all backgrounds from anywhere in the city. The idea of an Afrocentric school has been in and out of the spotlight since Ontario's Royal Commission on Learning in 1995 cited it as one possible fix for the stubborn dropout rate among students of color. It was raised anew in 2005 at a public forum on black achievement by education professor George Dei, who studies black youth disengagement. The idea gained steam last year when two local mothers argued Afrocentric schools could be a sort of academic test lab with lessons for mainstream schools. While Angela Wilson and Harrow said their dream is to have an Afrocentric alternative school in each corner of Toronto, they cheered the vote as a start.

2 comments:

Stopped Clock said...

Well this is a start, but as the article states, it's only the beginning. What the school board really wants is a separate brick-and-mortar school for ages K - 12 and an open enrollment system with a multiracial student body. And believe me, these new Africentric teachers will sell their souls for each naive little white couple they can con into sending their cute impressionable kiddies to that school. Ohhh yes. Get ready for 3rd graders re-enacting American slave rebellions, field trips to Afro-American landmarks in Detroit, and a whimsically nebulous grading system designed to ensure that "effort" and "enthusiasm" count just as much as knowledge. Get ready to hear white people telling you that they have Melanin Envy and wish they were dark enough to get a better suntan so they could shrug off their evil Ice People personality. And since the new multicultural O Canada anthem isn't black enough, they'll think up a new one. Or just borrow Detroit's if no one in the school has enough imagination to write their own. And when a gang of black students beats up a white kid 3 grades younger than them? Oh well, they're just taking out their frustration at the unimaginably painful experience of being a black student in a white nation. That little milkface was asking for it, anyway. And of course, it goes without saying that male black teachers will be sexually harassing white girls, and getting away with it, because who's she going to complain to?

Oh Canada, Canada, diaper of the world, doing what diapers do best. What sort of humiliation have you got planned for us next?

I notice the original article uses the spelling "Africentric". Did they decide the letter O was too offensive to persons of color? "There's no O in Africa! Banish the eurOpean cOlOnial O, the rOOt cause of all our prOblems!"

Average Joe said...

In my experience, liberals tend to be most "progressive" when it comes to other peoples' children but not with their own. For example, many liberals supported bussing because they knew it would never come to the schools that their children were attending.