De-Streamed

Director’s Statement

In Toronto, there is a practice called academic streaming, which separates kids based on ability and tends to disproportionately disadvantage racialized and differently-abled students, often due to subconscious biases. This same practice happens across North America and worldwide, under different monikers. We are forced to treat these systemic disadvantages with band-aids after the fact, rather than preventing them at the root.

At first, I intended to make a doc that focused solely on the dangers of educational streaming, until I learned about Westview, which is a high school at Jane & Finch in Toronto – a low-income, predominantly Black neighbourhood shrouded with negative misconceptions. The educators at Westview are infamous across Canada, as they spearheaded a movement to end racially motivated bias in schooling by “de-streaming” all their Grade 9 and 10 classes. This courageous investment in their students inspired a political, research-based movement across the country to end streaming and re-examine our understanding of racial bias in education.

As I learned more about Westview, what I found more powerful was to shed light on the people that were trying to right the wrongs – to tell the story of a group of educators who so deeply cared and believed in their students in ways that, perhaps no one had before.

Being that I grew up on and off in Jungle, a neighbouring area in Toronto with its own reputation, I understood aspects of this experience well. I was also acutely aware of what it felt like to be misperceived, and how detrimental it was to my self-esteem. In Grade 10, I returned to Canada after living in Central America for several years, and I remember being pushed into a lower stream math class, despite excelling at it as a child, simply because I was coming from a foreign country. I struggled to understand the repercussions at the time, but I had the sense that I was essentially being put in a room with other kids no one wanted to deal with. Thankfully when it came time to graduate, my interests grew away from STEM, otherwise it would have been essentially impossible for me to get the requisite classes.

I’ve come to realize that as kids, we have a tendency to live up to the beliefs that are placed on us, for better or worse. Even with the relative privilege of a white-passing man; I wince to imagine where I could’ve landed if things had been even just a little different.

Though our film is focused on a Toronto high school, its specificity will ring true for students, educators, and anyone who knows what it feels like to be underestimated simply because of how they look or who they are. DE-STREAMED offers a window into those trying to prevent this vicious cycle of misperception, and give our future generations a chance to live up to their highest potential.