KITCHENER — The historic charm of Suddaby Public School masks a deep division within.

The division is French immersion.

Suddaby's immersion classrooms are filled with high-performing children. Benchmarked across Grade 3 test results, 87 per cent of immersion students meet provincial standards across reading, writing and math.

Suddaby's regular classrooms are filled with low-performing children. Just 28 per cent of Suddaby students who are not enrolled in French immersion meet provincial standards.

The teaching streams differ in performance by 59 percentage points. It's the largest achievement gap by far out of 248 Ontario schools that offer both French immersion and regular English streams.

"This is really alarming," said Jorg Broschek, whose six-year-old son Len starts Grade 1 at Suddaby in September.

Suddaby is the extreme example of a problem that educators have allowed to develop at schools across the province.

French immersion, a popular, optional program where students are taught in French for half their school day, segregates children within schools and even on playgrounds. This clusters the higher-achieving students away from needier, lower-performing schoolmates, according to test results and other evidence.

Local immersion classrooms perform well above the Ontario average. Regular classrooms perform below the average. The worst-performing classrooms are regular classrooms at schools that offer French immersion.

Grade 3 test results, withheld from the public and obtained by the Record in a Freedom of Information request, reveal an achievement gap of 26 percentage points between teaching streams in the Waterloo Region District School Board. That's across 34 elementary schools with French immersion classrooms, based on the two most recent years of test results.

Across 248 Ontario schools with both teaching streams, the achievement gap is 19 percentage points.

It unsettles Jorg and Katharina Broschek to learn their son Len is about to join an elite classroom at Suddaby. That's not why they enrolled him in immersion.

"We want to have low-income families. And we want to have kids with special needs. We want our kids to be exposed to these," Jorg said.

They point to schools in their German homeland which they say are discouragingly divided along class, cultural and socioeconomic lines.

"In Canada we always expected that it's much more equal and fair. And I would still say it is, on balance," said Jorg, a professor in political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

"However, these numbers indicate that obviously, even within this system, there are certain selective mechanisms that tend to produce inequalities. And I think this is concerning.

"There's a reinforcement of certain inequalities within the society that the education system should actually mitigate, rather than amplify."

Also unsettled are Katie and Sean Elder. Their five-year-old son Angus is relocating to Sheppard Public School for French immersion in September after his home school at Suddaby could not squeeze him into its Grade 1 immersion class.

The couple considered keeping their son at Suddaby in a regular classroom but others warned them informally against doing that.

"Even before we saw these numbers, I thought that was very troubling that people thought that way," Katie said.

It seems to her as if the school board is quietly placing children in groups of advantage or disadvantage as early as Grade 1.

"The negative connotations of not putting your child in French immersion, that's all just whispered," Katie said.

"The kids are going to know 'I'm in this group, and they're in that group' and they're going to figure out 'I'm a good kid or I'm a bad kid' and that's a really dangerous message for kids to get at a very young age," she said.

"I don't know that there's any way for Suddaby or the board to know what the impact is of that."

Sheppard, the nearby school their son Angus will attend, is also a divided school. But it is not as divided as Suddaby.

Its French immersion students achieve reading, writing and math standards 82 per cent of the time. Regular students achieve standards half the time. That's an achievement gap of 32 percentage points.

The Suddaby parents are calling on the public school board to explain what it is doing to reform French immersion, to ease school divisions, and to mitigate have and have-not classrooms.

They want transparency around evidence and strategies.

"We all know that these problems won't go away in the short term," Jorg said. "But you have to develop a credible plan, a realistic plan, a scenario for the future of how you deal with it."

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The Elders want French education made available to all students in an inclusive way that doesn't effectively divide schools into two streams.

"That would be the ultimate goal," said Sean Elder, an electrical engineer.

The public school board would not explain why the achievement gap between teaching streams is so large at Suddaby, or reveal if it has any plans specific to Suddaby to address it.

"We respect the insights of that data for Suddaby, absolutely," said Alana Russell, board spokesperson. "We can appreciate what that data tells us. And what that tells us is that we need to continue our efforts toward closing the gap that it presents."

One board-wide approach is to pledge more supports for French immersion children who struggle, to help persuade parents not to switch them out to regular classrooms.

Immersion's high dropout rate effectively helps to cluster high achievers in the program. "We will provide support to your child the same way we would if they were in an English program," Russell said.

The board has denied letting parents steer top students to elite classrooms, saying that's not what it intends by providing French immersion.

What it intends, however, is not fully clear. French immersion does not aim to make children bilingual, despite what parents might think. Progress in French is not independently assessed until high school, when most students have dropped out of immersion.

The board plans to assess parent attitudes toward French immersion this fall, in hiring a consultant to review the program. The review follows a French immersion task force that concluded in April with more questions than answers, partly because the board has collected so little data.

There are factors that may help explain extreme classroom divisions at Suddaby.

The historic school is at the edge of downtown Kitchener. Compared to other schools in the public board, its students are almost twice as likely to live in poverty and they are three times less likely to have university-educated parents, according to demographic data from the Ministry of Education.

Such factors typically lessen achievement, which may help explain the low performance of many Suddaby students.

Another possible factor is the unequal placement of children with special education needs.

In this board and across Ontario, French immersion classrooms have few children with special needs who may require individual attention. Such children are concentrated in regular classrooms, at rates two to three times higher than immersion classrooms.

There are 8,451 students enrolled in French immersion in this region, almost all at the public board.

The Waterloo Catholic District School Board began offering immersion three years ago. Its test results are not yet available to compare streams.

jouthit@therecord.com, Twitter: @OuthitRecord

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