Chapter 8: How Inclusive do we Really want to be?: A Critical Exploration of the Toronto District School Board’s Special and Inclusive Education Policies and Outcomes¹

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is Canada’s largest and arguably most diverse public board of education (TDSB, 2018a). In addition to its many specialty programs and schools, the TDSB supports an extensive special education system (TDSB, 2016). The province of Ontario has developed guidelines and policies promoting inclusive education (Ontario Ministry of Education [OME], 2009)—an ideal that promotes children learning together in a classroom free of discrimination and bias regardless of their perceived abilities. However, each of the 72 school boards across the province has autonomy over how it chooses to enact such policies. Without direct instruction or mandates from the provincial government on how inclusion is to be actualized, approaches to inclusion of students identified as disabled or as having special education needs vary widely. While some boards within Ontario are fully inclusive, meaning they have little or no stand-alone special education programs for students identified as exceptional, the TDSB has close to triple the proportion of students in self-contained special education programs compared to the provincial average (Brown, Parekh, & Marmureanu, 2016). One of the key questions about this situation in the TDSB is “why?” Decades worth of research shows the social and academic benefits of inclusive education (ABT Associates, 2016) as well as the detrimental impacts of organizing students into groups by ability or achievement (Mitchell, 2010, 2015). The TDSB’s own data supports the international literature in demonstrating a significant reduction of secondary and postsecondary opportunities for students placed in special education, even when their achievement surpasses board and provincial averages (Parekh & Brown, 2018). Research illustrating the relationship between students’ experiences of belonging in school and identification/placement in special education shows a significant negative correlation, with students in special education experiencing heightened levels of exclusion (Parekh, 2014). The TDSB has made significant strides in advocating for more inclusive practice and has been remodeling its special education program delivery to promote inclusion. Yet, separate, stand-alone special education programs remain.