The Next Big Idea 10 concepts that could - University of Toronto ...

will naturally predominate in a given school. But the teachers
and curriculum are not reflecting these changing circumstances,
and that’s what Spence aims to correct.
“It’s not segregation, it’s salvation,” he says. (Catchy slogans
are often the glue Spence uses to get his messages to stick.)
“Getting an opportunity to be in an environment that reflects
who they are is salvation for many kids who end up not even
dropping out, but being pushed out because they don’t fit the
status quo.”
Spence thinks he might be able to stem the flight from
public schools by giving parents more choice in how their
children are educated. He would like to see four new specialized
schools open in 2011, adding to the 41 (out of 557 schools
in the Toronto board) that already exist. The new schools will
concentrate on choir and sports, as well as unisex education.
“One size doesn’t fit all,” says Spence. “We’re going to try to
provide opportunities so that parents and their children can
sit down and say here’s what we want in terms of a learning
environment, and where can we get it”
Many of these choices were available long before Spence
came along. French immersion, the granddaddy of boutique
schooling, has been around for more than 40 years. But the
Toronto of today offers vastly more: there are schools that
concentrate on the arts, on math and science, on social justice
and the environment. There is a school specifically for gay
teenagers, and one for single parents. One school holds kindergarten
classes outdoors when possible, and others are
unstructured, without tests or homework.
Most controversial, perhaps, are the schools tailored to
student ethnicity, such as the east end’s First Nations School,
or the much-discussed Africentric Alternative School. For
some, such schools revive the ugly spectre of segregation,
exactly the sort of menace the U.S. mercifully struck down
with Brown vs. the Board of Education in the 1950s. “I don’t
think it’s a good idea,” said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty
when the idea of an Africentric school was first proposed. “I
think our shared responsibility is to look for ways to bring
people together. One of the most powerful agents of social
cohesion is through publicly funded education.”
But total cohesion may be something of a pipe dream, says
Spence. “I think we are very much segregated, based on socioeconomics.
It’s happening already!” he exclaims. In Toronto,
seven out of 10 students belong to visible minority groups –
and since the city is carved into ethnic enclaves, certain groups
Spence “wouldn’t change a thing” about his own
upbringing, but he clearly knows what it’s like
to feel alienated in school. Born in England in
1962, he immigrated seven years later with his
parents and siblings to Windsor, Ontario. There,
as one of very few black students in his school, he was bullied
routinely. “I didn’t want to come to school,” he says. “There
were guys there who were going to try and take my lunch and
make me feel like I didn’t belong.” Still, attentive professional
parents (his mother was a nurse, his father an engineer) and
good relationships with teachers helped him to prosper.
He has joked that running from bullies helped him develop
athletic talents. In the 1980s, he played two seasons as running
back for the B.C. Lions before injury propelled him back
to school. After earning a degree in criminology, he started
working with juvenile offenders. “It was just really demoralizing,”
he says of that time. “I thought, I want to get to these
kids before they end up here. Because when they do, it’s almost
like society’s given up on them. So that was the contribution
that I was going to make: I wanted to make sure kids didn’t
end up in those circumstances.”
In 1996, he earned a doctorate from the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education and decided to apply his knowledge
as a teacher – then middle-school principal – in one of Toronto’s
lower-income neighbourhoods. This last experience informed
the second of his four books, entitled On Time! On Task! On a
Mission! It diarizes the 1998-1999 school year at Lawrence
Heights Middle School, a place where students were given to
hurling library books out the window, mooning teachers,
defacing property and worse. A place where one student told
him, “It doesn’t matter what you guys do. By the time I’m 16
I’m going to end up in jail.”
With a vigorous program of changes, including school
uniforms, summer camp and Saturday schooling, Spence was
able to instil hope in many of these young adolescents. It’s
something he’d been doing for a while. While teaching in
36 WWW.MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA