Arrival City vs. The Fraser Institute's School Rankings

This weekend I read Chapter 4 of Arrival City, but since it dealt primarily with push factors in rural to urban migration, I didn't find to much to think about in terms of an educational context. However, the publication of the Fraser Institute's annual rankings of Alberta schools was published on Sunday. The report takes over 600 schools and ranks them according to government exam results. It's a fairly contentious issue, especially as the rankings also publish information on the percentage of ESL students and special needs students at the school, as well as the average family income. Predictably, schools with higher percentage of ESL and special needs students and lower family incomes tend to rank lowest. The inclusion of this data makes it easy to consider comparing schools of similar composition, but still presumes that making predictions about future government exam performances based on past performances is a valid exercise.

Arrival City helps to highlight the dangers of this thinking. In an editorial that went along with the published rankings, a representative of the Fraser Institute mused that the bottom ten schools in the rankings tended to be chronically under-performing, and perhaps educational chains from the United States ought to be allowed to operate within the province to "fix" these schools.

Without commenting on the fitness of the government exams for comparisons, or whether private groups ought to be allowed to run schools in Alberta, whether or not these schools are "failing" their students cannot be assessed strictly by exam results. A notion of failure here carries with it an idea that the students who fail these exams are doomed to remain among the poor communities of the neighbourhood. If the neighbourhoods these schools are located in are functioning as "arrival cities" as author Doug Saunders might suppose, then we need to see what percentage of students writing government exams at the Grade 3 level remain within the neighbourhood to write them again and again at the Grade 6 and 9 level. If significant numbers of students are transferring out to other schools in different neighbourhoods altogether (with potentially better exam results) we might presume that the school, and by the extension the neighbourhood, is doing a good job giving those students the tools they need to integrate into the larger society. The continued existence of low exam scores at these schools might be better explained by the neighbourhood's attractiveness to the same demographic looking to integrate successfully into the city at large. In other words, the school's success at educating and enabling a particular kind of student to leave, encourages more of the same kinds of students to come to the school.

By contrast, an under-performing school that retains a large proportion of its students might be more fairly judged to be under-performing and in need of more considered reform.

Arrival City, Ch.3

My favourite part in Chapter 3 occurs when Saunders describes the Arrival City neighbourhoods as being "richer than they appear" in that accounting practices can only measure the resources that exist within the neighbourhood, but fail to account for family members that have moved out though still maintain economic ties to the neighbourhood. Saunders writes:

"This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city's immigrant districts are poorer or more disparate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need - a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. Rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks, and urban-planned redevelopments."

In reflecting on previous chapters, I have suggested that perhaps school districts need to take flexible approaches to school development. The perception of a particular school's identity and social role cannot be seen as static. In this chapter, it would appear that Saunders might suggest that school districts should dialogue with current and former inhabitants of the neighbourhood about the kinds of programs that ought to be offered.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.2

Having just read Chapter 2 of Doug Saunders' book on rural-urban migration, I am drawn to his focus that successful transitions to the urban environment is dependent on the success of relationships being created in these neighbourhoods. This intrigues me since, as an educator, I find that those of us interested in the 21st Century Classroom, tend to talk about the new emphasis of schooling as being on the development of relationships between students, especially between students of different backgrounds. Elsewhere on this blog I have suggested that the function modern K-12 institutions is to be more socialization than knowledge transfer, and it would seem that this is in keeping with the needs of these "Arrival" districts.

One of the immediate concerns that I have though is in regards to the quality of the physical school building. There is a tendency of school districts to believe in promoting universal values and attempting to insure a minimum of standards (in this case health and engineering ones) for all students. Creating a building along these lines in shantytowns is a very jarring idea, and one that would almost force the legitimization of these neighbourhoods. On the otherhand, I am not certain that the creation of a school as transient and immediate as the surroundings would necessarily be a bad thing. I'm not sure, either way.

The one problem that I keep thinking about, especially within the context of Calgary, is that immigration to "arrival" neighbourhoods, seem to promise eventual social mobility, but what about non-arrival neighbourhoods that appear to be stagnating? What is to be done here? Is the key to find ways to make them more attractive to urban newcomers? Is gentrification a different form of what Saunders is talking about, a kind of internal urban migration?

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.1

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders makes the claim in chapter one that certain peripheral cities, suburbs, or neighbourhoods function as transition zones for migrants. The social and economic role of these areas is to ease newcomers into an urban environment. It goes as a given then, the living conditions in these areas will be much lower than in other parts of the urban conglomeration, but still represent a step up, either in economic or social terms, than the other areas these migrants are leaving.

The problem, from an educational social reformist perspective, is how to mitigate or "raise up" the living conditions in these transition zones. But maybe, the more effective strategy is to concentrate on what happens to these zones as they build up, gaining economic and social clout, and in essence, cease acting as transition zones, forcing the urban periphery and the development of new transitions zones, further out. Perhaps this suggests we need a different idea of what a school looks like, one that encompasses a notion of different types of schools for different neighbourhoods. A school in Doug Saunders' transition zones has different social functions to fulfill than one in a more established, stabilized neighbourhood. There is a role to be played in assisting the transformation of schools from one type to another.

One of the problems with this idea however, is that the notion of different schools for different neighbourhoods also seems to suggest different learning outcomes for different neighbourhoods. The dream of educational reformers of the 1960s valued equality of outcomes for all students, regardless of locale. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept the death of that dream.