Ontario plans to revamp Grade 9 — with an eye to ending streaming in the first, “critical” year of high school — as part of its new equity plan that will also compel school boards to collect detailed data on everything from staff hires to student suspensions.

Education Minister Mitzie Hunter said in an interview that what happens now in Grade 9 — where students are streamed into the more theoretical academic, or the more hands-on applied courses — is a concern because teens in applied classes are less likely to finish high school or go on to post-secondary education.

“We talk about streaming as a really key aspect of our equity action plan, taking a fresh look at Grade 9,” Hunter said. “We know that Grade 9 is a critical year in terms of transition for students. We want to see Grade 9 as a year where students can explore their pathways and get excited about their pathways. We do not want it to be a year where students become demotivated and disengaged in school.”

While applied and academic courses began as a way to help students with different learning styles, Hunter said applied courses “have seen a disproportionate number of students . . . from racialized backgrounds, special education needs and . . . low-income students . . . .

“The status quo is unacceptable.”

Hunter said Ontario is the only province that streams so early.

Annie Kidder of the research and advocacy group People for Education, which has for years sounded the alarm on streaming, said she is pleased changes are on the way. Her group found that teens who have taken even a few applied courses and those who take applied math rarely go on to university.

“I’m really happy they are moving forward on this, and that they acknowledged, very concretely, that there is a big problem here,” she said.

However, Kidder warned that “the proviso in this is that you can’t just flick a switch. In places where they’ve run pilot projects — keeping all the kids together in academic courses — they’ve ensured that other resources are in place if kids need them. That has to be looked at.”

The province’s three-year equity plan will, for the first time, have school boards collect data on race, ethnicity and other factors to determine if certain groups are disproportionately represented in areas such as suspensions or expulsions and work to address them. Boards will also have to ensure that staff at all levels, as well as teaching materials, are diverse.

Educators say such detailed information on staff and students is valuable for boards to determine problem areas and where to put resources.

“It expands our knowledge about the young people that we have in our communities and to build on the census data,” said York University professor Carl James, whose research has found that Black students are twice as likely to be taking applied classes.

Such data, he added “should also prompt us to ask questions of the system.” If students aren’t doing well “what is the program we are providing that is not meeting their needs?”

For professor Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez at the University of Toronto, census data already collected by the Toronto District School Board for at least a decade — a board he considers a leader in North America in this area — led to specific programs for Black, Latin American and Indigenous students after discovering they were graduating in lower numbers.

“When you have data to show a pattern across a population, it’s very difficult to say there’s not a problem,” he said. “It doesn’t answer everything, it identifies patterns but you need sophisticated analysis about the source of those programs and come up with solutions.”

Ontario’s equity plan comes on the heels of a number of high-profile troubles in Ontario school boards, from data in Toronto showing a disproportionate number of Black students being suspended, expelled or in special education.

In the York board, parents raised concerns that the board was ignoring incidents of racism in schools, and it was accused of mishandling the case of a principal who posted Islamophobic material on her public Facebook page.

The board also came under fire for how it handled a trustee who publicly uttered a racial slur when referring to a Black parent after a meeting. Nancy Elgie has since resigned.

Patrick Case — the human rights expert and lawyer called in earlier this year to probe the York board — will oversee the province-wide changes as Hunter’s assistant deputy minister and head of the province’s education equity secretariat.

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“I’m not talking about equity in relation to downtown Toronto or downtown Mississauga,” Case said at Thursday’s announcement at a Peel Region school. “I’m talking about equity as it arises wherever it arises in this province. The issues in the north are very different from those in the south of the province — even in the south of the province as we go from side to side, you can see that there are major differences.”

He also noted that school board trustees will undergo equity training, which was found lacking in York Region during his investigation.

As for streaming, Case said it “is a structure . . . that needs to be addressed. But bear in mind that even if we remove the structure itself, that some of the mindsets that result in young people being streamed may still continue and that we have to work on that as well.”