Secondary School Graduation Requirements: Making Sense of Compulsory Schooling

• In Event: Roundtable Group 15
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Education Policies and Practices

Proposal

In September 2019, hundreds of thousands of youth around the world rallied to protest climate change. This unprecedented mobilization of youth voice through the school climate strike movement deserves critical reflection on its implications for compulsory public education. If Greta Thunberg and her peers “should be in school” instead of protesting, as she told world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019, what should they be learning?

This thesis investigates the graduation requirements in Ontario’s publicly funded education system in Canada since the beginning of the twenty-first century, to shed light on the purposes of education and how education might contribute to human flourishing. The two-part study applies the capabilities approach (Robeyns, 2017), informed by critical race theory and the historical context of settler colonialism (Ladson-Billings, 2022; Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016).

The first part engages in a post-structural policy analysis of the secondary school graduation requirements to explore “What’s the problem represented to be?” in terms of the purposes of compulsory schooling (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). The analyses are based on over 300 Ontario policy texts from when the requirements were established by the Progressive Conservative government in 1999 through the Liberal government (2003 to spring 2018). In the present study, graduation requirements are used as proxies for the purposes of schooling as they define the policy context for the upper boundaries of compulsory school completion. Although individual actors within the education system have diverse purposes for the actions taken in the context of schooling, the policy context introduces inherent constraints. If the purposes are defined, it may empower actors within and outside the system to engage with compulsory schooling differently.

The second part of the study examines the effects of the graduation requirement policies on students’ graduation and transitions to further education. The quantitative analyses focus on a cohort of students who began secondary school in 2013 in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which was the last cohort of grade 9 students to attend the 4-year secondary program during the previous Liberal minority government. Analysis of the associated effects of the graduation requirements on students’ graduation and transition to further education is essential for grounding the qualitative analysis of the requirements. In other words, how do the requirements relate to graduation and transition to further education?

This study may contribute to the literature on transitions to postsecondary education through an examination of how policy may or may not contribute to changes in desired student outcomes. Ultimately this thesis explores why we have compulsory schooling, to inform how it might contribute to human flourishing. Current limitations are discussed to spark dialogue about if there should be a change in the predominate values of compulsory schooling from those observed in the present analysis. The approach to normative values analysis offers one entry point to such a discussion regarding whether or not the education system living up to the hopes and aspirations for public education that individuals, communities, and collectively societies hold.

Author

• Rachel Holly Ryerson, Ontario Public Service