(Page 59 of 73) - Sexual Diversity and Public Schools in Canada and the United States authored by Rayside, David.

In formal policy terms, to be sure, Canadian provinces have been moved substantially toward
including sexual orientation in prohibitions on discrimination and harassment that apply to public
schools, the reluctant among them forced to do so by the Charter. This in theory offers
protection or redress to students or staff who have been the target of anti-gay bullying. Public
school teachers in Canada have also benefitted from shifts in law and policy that have applied
across the country, giving them access to job protection and employee benefits. To some extent,
such changes have occurred without the kind of controversy that erupts in the U.S. when sexual
diversity arises in the political arena.

However, the policy gains that have been secured more uniformly across Canada than the U.S. do
not seem to have translated into a greater visibility being given to sexual diversity in the public
schools of Canada. Nor do these formal protections seem to have led more widespread
challenging of the gendered assumptions of the curriculum and of day-to-day school life. There
seems more such visibility among students and educators, and more such challenge, in the U.S.
than Canada. What explains this?

One factor is striking contrast in the extent of activism supporting change. This is not a self-
evidently influential factor, since the intensity and endurance of American activism on other
sexual diversity issues is much greater than Canadian counterparts but without producing more
favourable results. In this case, however, the breadth of the schools agenda fought for by social
conservatives in the U.S. mobilizes reformist forces very widely. This is true only to some extent
in Canada, where most religious conservatives have a narrower agenda than their American
counterparts with less interest in rolling the clock back. The usual Canadian-American contrasts
in reformist resources mobilized around sexual diversity, therefore, is even more pronounced in
schooling.

Public schooling has been a cultural war zone for a very long time in the U.S.. The 20

century

is regularly marked by ferocious battles over teaching evolution or creationism, assimilating
differences or reflecting diversity, integrating blacks or segregating. These have all been national
debates, hard fought over, and still unresolved. Equity struggles, most obviously those related to
race and ethnicity, have also had schooling at the very centre of their agendas. This same
concern was amplified by the marginalized condition of hispanic students, and the experience of
new immigrant groups.

This intensity of attention to schooling over at least half a century is partly a result of explicitly
exclusionary practices. But it also comes from the particularly American optimism about human
potential, and the centrality of schooling in creating opportunity for individual advancement. It
also results from the long-standing belief that schools should “make” Americans out of its
citizens and immigrants. Such high stakes and bitter contests have led to the creation and
maintenance over some decades of dense and well-resourced activist networks prepared to devote
energy to schools.