The Globe and Mail

The success of its immigrant students has made Canada a darling on the world stage, the only country with a high proportion of newcomers to rank near the top on international tests.

But a closer look reveals the praise is overdone. Not all immigrant groups are thriving in Canadian schools, and the success of some is masking the struggles of others.

The stellar performance of East Asian students, those of Chinese background in particular, has lifted immigrant scores on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s tests of 15-year-olds in math, science and reading, and obscured the fact that Hispanic and Caribbean students are slipping through the cracks.

But a distinctly Canadian squeamishness about gathering data based on ethnic and national origin means there’s a paucity of information to help understand the problem – just scattered hints that something isn’t right.

For example, only one in five Creole-speaking students in Montreal graduates from high school on time. Only 42 per cent of Latin American students in Toronto meet standards on Grade 6 math tests, compared with 86 per cent of East Asians. Vietnamese students fare better in Montreal than they do in Vancouver, but no one knows why.

Some of the most important ideas in education have come from studies of race in schools. In 1966, a groundbreaking look at academic outcomes and race known as the Coleman Report led to the end of de facto segregation in U.S. schools.

On the other hand, history is littered with examples of misleading research built on presumed connections between race and intelligence. As a result, school boards have shied away from tracking such data.

A Canadian exception is the Toronto District School Board, where 70 per cent of students in Grades 7 through 12 have two parents born outside the country. The board recently explored its student demographics more deeply through a detailed census. The data have enabled it to understand its student population with a level of detail unprecedented in Canada.

“In a country like Canada in which immigration is such a central feature of national development, it would seem obvious that schools, school boards or provincial education authorities should collect data on the country of birth of students and their parents,” said Paul Cappon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning.

The one immigrant category that falls consistently below average are those whose families came from Latin America and the Caribbean, the source of roughly one in 10 immigrants to Canada in 2005. Only 23 per cent of the first generation go to university, by far the lowest rate among any immigrant group, according to a study by professors Ross Finnie and Richard Mueller.

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, recently conducted a study on the barriers to academic success for Latino students in Toronto. Some said they were forced to take jobs to support their families while others cited negative stereotypes and inadequate English language instruction.

Carolina Estrella, a 17-year-old grade 12 student at Toronto’s Western Technical High School, was born in Canada to parents from Uruguay and Ecuador. Her path through school has been difficult. Although she should graduate this spring, she has earned only about a third of the necessary credits.

The downward turn began when she was kicked out of her first high school for beating up a fellow student. The student had been taunting her with racial slurs, she said, so she threw him in a locker.

“You know what the problem is in these school districts,” she said. “The lower people like the Latinos don’t go to school and don’t graduate. I don’t think it’s our culture, I think it’s more that they don’t have enough money. The parents live in a not too good area. And they go to a high school that’s not too good.”