We are now several weeks into the new school year, which exposes hundreds of thousands of children to systemic racism. Or at least, that’s according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). As I show in a new report for the Aristotle Foundation, the commission’s new action plan is deeply flawed.

Here are just three of the bold, unsubstantiated claims in the OHRC’s action plan. First, there’s “systemic anti-Black racism and discrimination in Ontario’s publicly funded education system.” Second, anti-black racism in Ontario “has specific historical roots in European colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” And, third, the continued marginalization of the black population has “led to systemic anti-Black racism being embedded in power structures which perpetuate advantages for people of European descent, such as curriculum focused exclusively on European history, or setting aside the scientific or literary contributions of those not of European descent.”

However, past slavery has nothing to do with outcomes in schools today. It’s true that across two centuries, there were up to 7,500 people enslaved in Canada, mostly in New France, and about 35 percent were black. Thankfully, slavery was abolished in 1834, before Canada was even a country, although there have unfortunately been other state-sanctioned race-based injustices since then. The Canadian government charged a head tax on approximately 82,000 Chinese between 1883 and 1923, and we forcibly expelled 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes, confined them to internment camps, and dispossessed them of their property between 1942 and 1949.

If historical discrimination means systemic disadvantages for Canadians today, then Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians should be doing relatively poorly today. But the income data show Canadian-born men and women of Chinese and Japanese backgrounds have higher average earnings than their white counterparts—surely an unexpected outcome if society was rigged to disadvantage them.

Academic performance data from Ontario’s public schools tell the same story. Anybody looking for evidence that “people of European descent” have unfair advantages in Ontario’s schools will not find it in published test score results.

According to a 2024 report from the Peel District School Board, students from East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and “multiple racial” backgrounds were more likely (on average) than their white counterparts to reach provincial standards over the past three years in six standardized tests administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office: Grade 3 reading, Grade 3 writing, Grade 3 mathematics, Grade 6 writing, Grade 6 mathematics, and Grade 9 mathematics.

Data from the Waterloo-Catholic District School Board for 2021/22 similarly show South Asian Grade 6 students outperforming white students on all three subjects—reading, writing, and mathematics. East or Southeast Asian Grade 6 students were about on par with white students in reading, but outperformed in writing and mathematics.

Other publicly available data from past years from school boards across the province, including the Toronto District School Board, show students from various Asian backgrounds academically outperforming the average. Simply put, there’s no convincing evidence to support the OHRC’s claim that “people of European descent” are advantaged in Ontario’s education system.

The OHRC does produce evidence that racism takes place in Ontario’s schools, and racist incidents warrant condemnation and efforts to reduce them. However, individual acts of racism are not the same as systemic discrimination. The OHRC report gives no examples of systemic racial discrimination—that is, that policies or structures in Ontario’s education system discriminate against black students. None!

However, as noted in the OHRC report, the system does discriminate based on race—to provide special benefits to black students (e.g., the Toronto District School Board’s Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement, which runs programs and events aimed at improving educational experiences and outcomes for black students).

The OHRC report makes 29 recommendations, to be undertaken variously by school boards, education faculties, teacher unions, the provincial government, and other organizations, on how to address anti-black racism in education. Summarizing them is beyond the scope of this article, but one clear and effective way to reduce racism in Ontario’s education system is notably absent: increase school choice.

If Ontario’s government-run education system is systemically racist, as the OHRC claims, the obvious solution would be to give parents more choice and more access to alternatives to the racist government-run system. If given access to other choices, parents would surely not send their children to government-run schools where they will face systemic racism.

Matthew Lau is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and the author of the new report, “Are Ontario schools systemically racist? Addressing the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s claims.”