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Adam Rennie: What
compelled you to write this book?
Tim
McCaskell: Well, I
left the Toronto School Board in 2001 in the midst
of the Harris Revolution, having seen, in the
previous 3 or 4 years, not only the work that we
had done destroyed, but the memory of it
disintegrated, so that nobody, other than a few of
us who had been involved, seemed to have any idea
of what had been done--a situation exacerbated by
the amalgamation of the Board, when a whole bunch
of new people who had never been involved were
suddenly in positions of power. So my major
motivation was to try to preserve the memory of
what had been done for those 20 years.
I guess a second motivation
was personal therapy, because it had been a very
dispiriting experience to see all our work
destroyed, and I really wanted to revisit the times
when the world had been much more hopeful. In a
certain way, it was quite therapeutic to remember
what had been accomplished, which, as it turned
out, allowed me to figure out exactly how things
had been connected, because when you're in the
thick of it, there's often a whole lot of stuff you
don't pay attention to.
AR: You've
clearly witnessed a lot in those 20 years.
Considering all the setbacks and everything you've
seen, how far do you think we've come in the race
to equity?
TM:
We came a long way--although right now I would say
that we are, in many respects, worse off than we
were before that struggle began in the early 70s.
The important thing that has remained is a
vocabulary for describing different kinds of
oppression, and that vocabulary seems to have
seeped into a kind of a general consciousness. In
the early 70s, people were really struggling for
names to call things and often didn't have real
concepts. Certainly, that is now available, so it's
easier to talk about what's happening.
But in terms of a systemic
response, we are worse off. For example, one of the
things that the old Toronto Board did from the
early 70s was to collect data on students on a
regular basis that included information on
socio-economic class, gender, first language, and
race. It was relatively easy to correlate student
success and student streaming to all of those kinds
of factors, which meant that you could then begin
to look for ways of changing the situation and
engage in a critique of the way the system was
shaping the lives of particular students, based on
race and gender and other factors. Now, after much
lobbying and fighting, the trustees have finally
pushed through a motion to begin gathering those
statistics again, but the administration of the
Board is doing everything it can to make sure that
that doesn't happen, because this kind of thing is
"so controversial." They're now involved in some
kind of bizarre process of setting up an expert
advisory committee, which would include luminaries
from God-knows-where to guide this terribly
controversial project. As a result, nothing is
happening. What is really galling about all this is
that one or two of the people who actually did that
kind of work in the Toronto Board were the only
people in the country who really have experience
with doing it, and have been completely iced out of
the process. They are now approaching retirement,
so if they don't begin to do this work and pass on
their experience to a new generation, the ability
to do this will be completely lost.
The Board is saying that
because this gathering of information is so
controversial, we're going to have to get some
outside organization--probably some big American
firm--to do it, which will cost millions of
dollars, when it could be done in-house for next to
nothing. And that will mean that since it costs so
much money, it will only be done once and they'll
be off the hook. That's simply an example of how
far we've slid back--something that was obviously
important and done without controversy twenty years
ago now becomes this incredible hot potato that
everybody is bouncing around.
AR: So given this
current climate, what do you see as the
challenges--the work that needs to be done NOW to
further equity programs in our
schools?
TM:
Well I think it goes beyond equity programs. The
problems with the Board and education are
fundamental and systemic. To get to equity
programs, you've got to begin to confront those
problems. The major one is governance. When people
say "What's the major problem in education?" and I
say "Governance," they blink disbelievingly, but
the vehicle that made change in the Toronto Board
possible in the 70s and 80s was the fact that it
was controlled by trustees who were accountable to
communities who they represented-- trustees who
were full-time, knew the workings, who could tell
the educational bureaucracy what should be done,
who could control hirings and firings and
promotions (which meant that they had clout in that
bureaucracy), and who could ensure that the demands
and the needs of the communities were being met.
The Toronto Board used to have about 22-25 trustees
for the old city of Toronto. Now for the
much-expanded metro, there are still 22 trustees
who are responsible for areas that are as large as
federal ridings. There are dozens and dozens of
schools and the trustee cannot possibly know the
administrators, the teachers, or the specific
situations. They're just a) spread too thin, and b)
can now only earn $5000 per year maximum, which
means that they can't be full-time trustees--if
they're young enough, they still have to be earning
a living. So what we have are people who are
independently wealthy, which produces class bias;
and people who are retired, who for all of their
good wishes, are often too tired to work 20 hours a
day, which is what most trustees did. And today's
trustees have no control over the day-to-day
functioning of the Board--they can basically just
keep up with the reports. So the ability of
communities through trustees to actually grasp the
system and begin to shake it and make it work in
particular ways is gone.
Finance is the second
challenge. We used to be able to raise money
through local taxes. Now everything is collected
through the province, and there's a funding formula
that is extraordinarily inadequate for urban
schools. There simply isn't money to run the kinds
of programs and meet the kinds of needs of
Toronto's diverse communities.
I think the last thing that
is a major challenge is developing a vision of
education. The neoliberal hegemony that we are
dealing with now sees education as a tool to feed
the needs of an economic system. So if what we're
looking at now is McJobs, then we're looking to
train people to become hamburger flippers. The
vision of education that was predominant in the old
Toronto Board was not that. Certainly, people
needed to be given certain skills to be able to
work, but there was also a notion that you were
educating people to become active, and critical,
and effective citizens. And that vision is gone. So
the Board needs to begin to re-examine what the
purpose of education is and once again challenge
the notion that the only purpose of education is to
serve capitalism.
AR: One of the
things you were largely involved with in furthering
those "old school" educational goals of encouraging
critical, active, and effective citizenship was
Kandalore--the camps you held there. Can you say a
bit on how these came about, your experience there,
and what you think their legacy has
been?
TM:
Well, the camps actually began by chance. The
province of Ontario used to have a retreat program
for students that involved schools right across the
province. The idea was to bring kids together from
schools around Ontario so that they'd understand
what was going on in other parts of the province
and develop leadership skills. Shortly after the
Race Relations Report was tabled in 1979, people in
the Race Relations Office realized that there was
enough diversity within the city of Toronto to
develop a similar program. But they also wanted to
go beyond the notion of a leadership program--at
that time they were attempting to implement the
recommendations of this 1979 race relations policy
and were facing a great deal of resistance from
administrators and teachers, to a certain extent.
They had support from parents' groups, who were
pushing this from the outside, but they recognized
that students were really the ones who knew what
was going on on the ground in their schools. The
notion was to get those students together to get
them to think critically about what was happening
in their schools and to get them organized so that
they could push for implementation of aspects of
the policy that affected them. So in essence,
Kandalore originally came out of this leadership
program in Toronto, with a dramatically different
kind of activist twist.
There are hundreds, if not
more, young people who learned their activism at
those camps and began to develop a social analysis
of how the world was put together, what racism and
other forms of oppression were, and who still carry
that on now in their lives as adults. Many of them
are raising their own families and have kids in the
school system now. So that's a legacy! I also know
that some schools still have active student
anti-racist groups that have continued for 15-20
years, and were originally founded by Kandalore
students. So even within today's schools, there are
still remnants of that experience 20 years
later.
AR: Have you been
able to keep in touch with any of the
students?
TM:
Oh yeah! Of course, mine is a biased sample because
I keep in touch with the ones that are active. But
I do know of many old students who are now active
in their communities. There's one young man, I
don't keep in touch with him now, but I was
constantly writing letters to get him out of jail
because he was an activist who kept chaining
himself to things and getting thrown in jail. I can
think of somebody else who was active in the
waterfront development, went on to his doctorate
looking at the organization of water resources and
community control. There are many who are very
active in anti-racist work and anti-homophobia work
and who are doing training of their own now. So
yeah, I am in touch with a lot of people whose
lives were shaped by the Kandalore experience.
AR: So despite the
lack of systemic change, there are people out there
who are continuing the work.
TM:
Yeah, definitely.
AR: Do you think
there was anything particular about Toronto as a
city, and as a school system as well, that made it
a fertile ground for the equity work that began in
the 70s and 80s?
TM:
Oh absolutely. As the largest city in Ontario and a
major immigrant reception area Toronto has always
had a very diverse population. The way the old city
was organized, the immigrant communities tended to
be concentrated in the centre of the city, which
meant it was easier to organize in order to be able
to push for their demands. Toronto's diversity in
terms of culture and race was enormously important.
A main thesis of my book is that the force for
institutional change comes from the communities who
are most affected by particular forms of
oppression. Until those communities are organized
and find their voice, there isn't anything to push
the institution to make change. Toronto's diversity
was really important in terms of anti-racist and
multicultural work. As well, because Toronto had a
thriving women's movement, there were voices that
could push for anti-sexist work. And Toronto also
had the largest and probably well-organized gay
community in the country, so that meant that there
were voices constantly pushing for anti-homophobia
work. It was that community diversity that led to
the beginnings of the equity work and the fact that
then-trustees, who had to be elected by these
communities and were responsible to them, could
begin to push from the top of the organization.
AR: Do you think
the Toronto experience can be applied to other
cities? Are there things other cities can learn
from us?
TM:
Yes, absolutely. There are very few cities now in
Canada that are still completely homogenous - they
may not have the extent of the diversity of
Toronto, but this is no longer the 50s, right? I
think the major lesson from the Toronto experience
is that to take advantage of that, the first step
has to be organizing communities. In other words,
you can't do it for them, you can only do it from
them and with them. If other communities and other
school boards want to take on this task, then they
need to figure out what kinds of resources are
necessary to actually begin to produce community
cohesion that can back these kinds of changes.
Otherwise, somebody will invent policy, it will get
passed, and then the political winds will shift,
and there will be no one to defend it--no one to
scream and kick, no one to keep up the pressure.
One thing we learned at the Toronto Board was that
the bureaucracy was always willing to give under
pressure but as soon as the pressure was off,
things would return to business as usual. It was
that constant pressure, that constant demand for
research, the constant pushing, that allowed us to
sustain that 20-year experiment.
AR: You've been
involved in teaching students, teachers, parents,
politicians, and community groups, but as you say
teaching is as much about learning as the other way
around. What have you learned, what have you taken,
from your years as an equity
activist?
TM:
Hmmm. I guess there are maybe three different
stages of my learning. First, I grew up in a
homogenous, white, largely Protestant environment
and was a middle-class, reasonably well-educated,
white male. The first thing I had to learn was that
the world wasn't perfect for everybody. I had to
learn to open my eyes to situations that were not
immediately available to me in my daily life
experience.
The second thing was to
learn to abandon simplistic and dogmatic
understandings of how this world was put together
and what needed to be done to change it--to
recognize that this was an extremely complex
process, and that there weren't any simple
solutions, even though there were certain
fundamental things that needed to be attended to.
So stage one was becoming
aware that there was a problem, two was overcoming
dogmatism about the problem and I guess three was
recognizing that this was an ongoing process of
learning, and accepting that you never actually got
it right-- that you maybe hopefully got it righter,
but that there was always new stuff to learn, new
people who had been silenced that were coming to
the floor, things that had to be rethought,
mistakes that had to be corrected. So this notion
of an ongoing self-educational process was the
third stage of my learning-- that one can never
become complacent.
AR: So even though
the race to equity is not over, and from what I've
heard you say, it may never be over, how would you
describe your experience in it so far?
TM:
It's been personally immensely rewarding. It has
certainly shaped who I am--and I'm relatively happy
with who I am! The huge defeat--which can't be
underestimated-- that took place in the late 90s
was enormously dispiriting and depressing. But one
of the things that I think is important about the
book is that it's a look back on the history of the
race--and in looking back, we can recognize what is
possible, even though today it might seem highly
improbable, but it's still possible, and therefore
we can have hope. If the conditions existed to be
able to do this kind of work twenty years ago then
this is not a mad fantasy--it's something that we
can still continue to struggle for.
AR: Running the
race to equity has clearly been a large part of
your life's work. What do you hope readers will
take away from your story of it?
TM:
A sense of history. The recognition that people
have been working and thinking about these
questions for a long time. I constantly meet young
people who have taken inequity work up and think
"This is where it all begins. " And I admire their
enthusiasm but sometimes despair of their depth of
knowledge--because without a sense of history, they
are prone to making exactly the same kinds of
mistakes that we made in the past. And through our
mistakes, we learned that there is a range of
strategies--some of them work, and some of them
don't--and that we really need to think through the
consequences of those strategic choices.
The book also has lots of
practical ideas for things that can be done in
schools and institutions. I wanted to sprinkle
those throughout so that a teacher might be able to
adapt some of those ideas into his or her
classroom. It's not a particularly theoretical book
in that way--there is a lot of practical hands-on
stuff in it.
The third thing I hope
people take away from the book is a sense of what
factors produce institutional change. It seems to
me that there's still a lot of naiveté in
terms of what's necessary to make an institution
function differently. I guess that would be the
theoretical part of the book--the section that
deals with what factors would be effective in
making large-scale institutions, like boards of
education, actually move and transform themselves,
along with what people need to be looking for, how
they need to be organizing.
And then finally, and I
don't know if this is explicit in the book, I hope
the book gives rise to an understanding of the
connection between so-called "fiscal conservatism"
and social conservatism. It's really interesting
how in our present political moment, people like
Belinda Stronach, for example, say that they're
fiscal conservatives (which is supposed to be a
good thing) but not social conservatives. I think
that the latter part of Race to Equity, which looks
at the impact that the Harris Revolution--primarily
a fiscally conservative revolution--had on equity
and the treatment, aspirations, barriers that
different groups faced, should be profoundly
enlightening. You don't have to wear a Ku Klux Klan
robe to institute economic policies that profoundly
disadvantage people of colour, and you don't need
to be a Jerry Falwell to do stuff that rips apart a
gay and lesbian community, and you don't have to be
an enormous sexist to produce policies that
profoundly disadvantage women and set women back
years and years and years. I really wanted people
to take that kind of thing away from the book. One
of my regrets is that I didn't say that more
explicitly in the text, even though I think it's
embedded in there--that this distinction between
fiscal and social conservatism is an illusion. If
the fiscal conservatives get their way, social
conservatism ends up being justification and an
explanation for what happens afterwards.
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