In A Class by Themselves?, Jason Ellis combines extensive archival research into the auxiliary school system of the Toronto public schools with a deft handling of special education's history in North America. Ellis leaves readers with a detailed, fascinating portrait of the auxiliary school system in Toronto public schools between 1910 and 1945.
During this era, Toronto's public school system had several unique characteristics: it was well connected with the broader debates over disability and intelligence across the continent; it provided education side by side with Ontario's Catholic school system, leaving Jewish and Roma children as notable minorities in the public school system; and it had much lower secondary enrollment than many American urban school systems. It is thus a singular case in which to explore the history of early special education, and Ellis documents how the unique history in Toronto compares with the broader historiography of special education.
Ellis traces changes in the auxiliary school system from its origins in a mixture of classes putatively intended to help overage children catch up to their peers, on the one hand, with classes for children judged “subnormal” in intelligence, on the other. Over the next several decades, Ellis argues, auxiliary classes in primary grades shifted from this mixture of purpose to a less-academic, more IQ-testing-driven system in the 1920s, and then toward a model of “opportunity schooling” mixed with adjustment-oriented psychology in the mental hygiene movement in the 1930s and 1940s.
Through the decades, Ellis contends, Toronto's school bureaucracy used the auxiliary school system as a critical tool in managing enrollment growth. In this way, A Class by Themselves? recenters both special education and school officials within larger debates about social reform in urban Ontario. Ellis documents that the system's founders and later school officials were embedded in broader intellectual and social networks that left auxiliary classes as key to broader hopes about managing poverty and middle-class Protestant concerns about social decay.
Far from being at the mercy of broader trends and larger debates about disability and special education, Toronto's auxiliary classes were shaped by local decisions. That relative local autonomy allowed the system of primary auxiliary classes to swing in character so dramatically decade by decade. For example, the shift away from unidimensional assumptions about IQ came with greater attention to subject-specific challenges, or “special-subject disabilities,” connected to larger debates about intellectual disabilities but establishing practices decades before the dominance of learning disabilities across North America. The discussion of special-subject disabilities debates in Toronto is one of Ellis's contributions that exploits his command of archival materials and the broader historiography.
The Canadian division of common schooling into public and Catholic systems created another unique characteristic of early public special education in Toronto: with many immigrant Catholic families attending Catholic schools, the most prominent minorities in Toronto's public schools in poor neighborhoods during the interwar era included Jewish and Roma children as well as Italian children. In Hester How Public School between 1930-31 and 1944-45, for example, Roma, Jewish, and Italian children were overrepresented in auxiliary and opportunity classes, Roma children most of all (p. 171).
Finally, the low interwar enrollment in secondary education in Toronto created a different context for the role of special education than for contemporary school districts in the United States. Toronto's junior vocational schools were heterogeneous in the 1920s and 1930s—much more of a mix of students than the primary grade auxiliary classes. But in Toronto, enrollment was dominated by academic curriculum, and the junior vocational schools contained a minority of students. Instead of being one of many ways that secondary schools differentiated enrollment, it was central to differentiation within schools, in large part because not attending school was the modal behavior of teenagers—differentiation from school attendees. And as World War II vacuumed adults from industrial and service employment, students with disabilities were among those who had the chance to prove their skill in various occupations—something that (once again) the school system responded to at a local level in resetting curricular expectations after the war.
In addition to the story of Toronto's auxiliary system, Ellis exploits school records about parental and child interactions with the auxiliary system, combined with select published memoirs. In doing so, he comes the closest of any special education historian of this era to describing the range of views of students and their families in special education. In a few cases, responses came collectively, as when the president of the Ontario Association of the Deaf in 1945 condemned the system's focus on oralism instead of teaching deaf children sign language. For the most part, however, the responses Ellis documents were a matter of individual reactions to placement decisions and the schooling that children had available to them—what Ellis called a mix of “acceptance, avoidance, and ambivalence” (p. 142).
Ellis's history of Toronto's auxiliary class system raises some questions unanswered in the book. First, how much did the brief ascendancy in IQ in Toronto's primary-form auxiliary system shape later dynamics, especially in secondary streaming (tracking)? Given the rapid shifts in the character of the system, I am not entirely convinced that the interwar history established much that was a precedent as secondary enrollment continued to rise after World War II.
Second, how much can we learn from the local history about the relationship between professional ideologies (e.g., eugenics or mental hygiene), on the one hand, and bureaucratic school systems that have their own reasons for differentiation? Toronto's auxiliary class history as a case doesn't quite fit in the existing historiography of either differentiated schooling in North America or special education. Finally, largely omitted is mention of the Catholic school system that sat parallel to the city's public schools. What were the relationships between developments in the public school system and the parallel Catholic school system? Given the extensive intellectual networks of public school officials, including leaders of the auxiliary school system, readers naturally might wonder how children with disabilities were treated in the Catholic schools, and if developments in the Catholic system reflected at all the debates in public schools.
These questions only become possible with the depth of this local history. Ellis's work integrates intense archival work, including the coding of pupil records at several schools, with the provincial, national (and continentwide) context. A Class by Themselves? is a remarkable achievement. Fortunately for Ellis and readers, the University of Toronto Press provided the type of support for a local, specialized monograph that this topic and this quality of work deserves.
