Linda Gyulai • Montreal Gazette Feb 21, 2023
Black students in Quebec are overrepresented in special education and behavioural classes, and the researchers behind one of the first studies to gather data on systemic racism in schools in the province are calling on the Quebec education department to officially recognize that it exists.
“The big picture that we’re calling for is recognition that anti-Black racism exists in the school system, that it exists in Quebec, and to find ways of helping teachers to be able to be prepared for the biases they may inadvertently have and to know how to deal with it,” said Lerona Dana Lewis, a co-author of the study spearheaded by the non-profit Lasalle Multicultural Resource Center (LMRC) with funding from Heritage Canada.
Lewis and other members of the research team presented their preliminary findings at an event tied to Black History Month hosted by the LMRC in LaSalle on Tuesday evening.
Lewis, an assistant professor in the University of Ottawa’s faculty of education, and her research team interviewed 42 participants who live on and off the island of Montreal for the study, which began in the fall of 2021. The group includes high school students, students over 18 who attend adult-learning centres and parents. Focus group sessions are planned next and the final report is due in April.
While the data compiled from the interviews are important, Lewis said, “the stories matter more.”
“It was very emotional for me to go through and hear some of what the students experienced, and especially knowing that in our society Black people — Black women, Black men — are presumed either incompetent or (perceived) in a negative way,” she said.
Black youth in Quebec high schools are channeled into programs that either don’t meet their needs or interests or are below their abilities, the research team found. There’s also an absence of black history education in the school curriculum and a lack of diversity among school staff, all of which the researchers say confirms long expressed allegations of systemic barriers and inequality in the treatment of black youth.
For decades, we have been observing many black youth in our school system having so many problems and we had to do many interventions,” said Gloria Ann Cozier, a psychotherapist and social worker who volunteers with LMRC.
“After many decades, now volunteering at LMRC, we realized that we continue to do the same interventions in the schools with the youth.”
Problems that were raised by participants in the research include Black students being disciplined for minor infractions much more than their white counterparts, and Black students being overrepresented in special education classes because they’re identified as having social maladjustments and learning difficulties, Cozier said.
“They’re being somehow streamlined into those special education classes,” she said. “We know from the literature systemic racism exists, there’s no question about it. However, we did not have any clear understanding of the interaction of what they’re going through — systemic racism — and the overrepresentation that we were seeing of many of our youth not being … prepared properly for advanced studies.”
Teaching approaches can adversely affect Black youth and the lack of teaching on Black history affects Black students’ feelings of belonging and self-worth, Cozier said.
She added that the group hopes that the research will lead school board officials, school administrators, teachers and the Quebec education department to understand the problem of systemic racism and put money where it’s needed.
Cozier said she was surprised by some of the experiences related by parents, including that their children were placed in special education classes from elementary school through high school without the parents being informed or without the child ever being reintegrated into the regular stream.
“That’s really concerning for us,” Cozier said. “It really impacts on their self-esteem.”
One of the youth interviewed for the study told the researchers, “‘I’m not good for anything anyway so I’m not even going to be going to college’,” she said. “There’s just no aspiration at all when it comes to kids being streamlined into special education classes.”
The researchers interviewed French-speaking and English-speaking students and found francophone students are having the same experiences as anglophone students, Cozier said. However, it’s “double jeopardy” for anglophone students, she added.
Guests at the event included politicians, including members of the LaSalle borough council.
Data gathered by the Institute for Research and Education on Race Relations (IRERR) on racial profiling in Quebec schools was also presented.
LMRC, which is run mainly by volunteers, was started in 2004 in response to a lack of services for anglophone visible minorities in LaSalle.
While the event was going on in LaSalle on Tuesday, some LMRC representatives were at a ceremony at Montreal city hall to announce funding for another project by the group that tackles high unemployment among racialized children. Youth will use the funding for a year-long series of podcasts that will allow them to develop new skills as they interview police, firefighters, school administrators and others.