Out of Sight out of Mind: Toronto's Two Tiered School System
Background: Consequential of neoliberal principles of restructuring, TDSB was re-created through amalgamation in 1998, by merging seven local boards of education. Despite its post-amalgamated size (i.e. the largest school board in Canada and the fourth largest in North America), the newly created board was no longer having access to a generative funding tax base for all its member schools. Subsidies were now to be received entirely through the Ministry of Education and exclusively based on a funding formula driven by enrollment. Dependent on numbers juxtaposing average school size and staff salaries to registration figures and square footage per student, TDSB forenamed 138 schools as 'underutilized' and officially closed 26 of them.
The issue of school closures triggered a strong public outcry across Toronto. Schools play a vital role within communities, as they facilitate a concrete educational base while also grounding neighborhood integration: they serve as voting locations and spaces for tenant association meetings or pre-election campaigns. While some advocacy efforts reversed the school closures process, many others have not. Civil engagement gets associated with high(er) levels of neighborhood income, and it is within such context that we hypothesized that most closed schools were located within the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Methodology: A GIS cartographic design combining hot-spot analysis and dot-mapping was used to visually map the closed TDSB locations. The twofold spatial dimension contained: a) a geocoded points layer of school locations and b) a classified choropleth map layer of median incomes. ArcMap, a GIS software, was used to spatially map the catchment location of the closed schools.
Results: 26 schools across Toronto have closed their doors. Most of the locations clustered together, within lower income areas, while entire neighbourhoods were completely void of any closures. These areas had an average median income of $64,841, a tenth lower than Toronto’s average median income of $74,004. There seems to be a correlation between the locations of school closures and neighbourhood median incomes. Higher income neighbourhoods kept their school system intact, while lower income areas have been left behind, twofold disadvantaged, first by economics, and second by lack of educational access, the main equalizer facilitating upward economic mobility.
Practice Implications: Study findings could guide social work advocacy efforts and be of great use to community groups interested in bracketing school closures trends. Data could also inform future policy positions of TDSB decision making executives.
Research contribution(s): Much used in socio-economic data and Census analyses, spatial modelling has not been often utilized in educational research and planning. This study also shows its tremendous potential for social work research applications.