The choice of a school for your child used to be limited to issues of geography and your interest in French immersion or Roman Catholicism. Today, it resembles a digital television lineup: Would you care for a skateboarding school, or are you a fan of the fine arts, music or science? Perhaps a Muslim or Mandarin school is more to your liking? There’s a school for you.
This fall, new public education offerings across Canada include an all-boys school in Calgary and a Niagara-area school hoping to boost economically disadvantaged kids.
The product of about a decade of tinkering, public education’s new-found taste for niche programming seems to be insatiable. And while it’s emboldened by new thinking from education experts, the trend is largely driven by parents’ hunger for their children to be more engaged in school, to improve academically or to tap into a particular skill or interest more fully.
“Parents were telling us quite clearly they wanted more choice,” says Cathy Faber, the superintendent of learning innovation at the Calgary Board of Education. “They weren’t confident any more that the one-size-fits-all model worked. From our side we already knew that it didn’t work.”
For kids who are struggling academically, schools such as Toronto’s Oasis Skateboard Factory, which opened in 2009, and the DSBN (District School Board of Niagara) Academy in Niagara, opening this fall, aim to re-engage them. At Oasis, students design and market skateboards while following the provincial curriculum. At DSBN, kids skip shop in favour of more reading and math in the hopes of getting into university. Other schools cater to the gifted or sporty sets. The trend has become so big that Edmonton, for example, has 37 alternative schools (as well as independent non-profits that operate under the term “charter school” through an agreement with the provincial government).
After years of studying the latest theories on how boys learn differently than girls and how they might be better served in the classroom, Calgary school principal Garry Jones is about to put those ideas – including more activity, different kinds of books and more male teachers – into practice at Sir James Lougheed School, the city’s first all-boys public institution.
“I’m so excited I can hardly stand it,” he says.
Eighty students are already registered for kindergarten to Grade 5.
“I’m hoping we can pass on what we learn to other teachers,” Mr. Jones says. “We know that, in general, boys have more energy and have a harder time sitting in the classroom. By Grade 3 or so they do more poorly in reading and writing.”
But as the country’s education model morphs from the old factory style of learning to this more consumer-based model, critics worry we may be moving too fast to know where we’re going.
Research on both charter schools and public all-boys schools is “a mixed bag,” says Lance McCready of the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Some schools engage students and promote strong grades. Others don’t, he says.
Early results from Toronto’s two-year-old Africentric Alternative School are promising, he says, despite criticism that many of the kids are middle-class and may have done well anyway.
Prof. McCready has been involved in a research project led by New York University on single-sex schools in the United States with kids mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds. One, Chicago’s Urban Prep, which selects students by lottery, graduates a huge percentage of its students, who go on to university. It’s now expanding to create more schools in a kind of educational franchise. “But not all of them are Urban Prep,” he says.
While he’s philosophically in favour of specialized learning, Prof. McCready, who teaches urban education, says that in practice there are stumbling blocks. Some schools end up teaching in remarkably mainstream ways, “only the demographics are different.” And some of the snazzy promises made at the outset can be trimmed due to tight finances or a need to prepare for standardized provincial tests.
