Toronto District School Board Faces Plagiarism Controversy

On May 17, the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB)  planning and priorities committee held a meeting to share progress, data and other information related to changes that the TDSB had made to the Central Student Interest Programs Policy last year. 

At issue was how the district chooses which applicants get to attend the district’s specialty schools, which include ones focused on the arts, mas and science. In a bid to democratize the application process and remove barriers many students face, the school moved from a merit-based application system, where students compete against one another for slots, to a lottery-based one.

The changes were highly controversial among many parents, who were interested in this update on how the new system was going.

The star of this meeting was a report filed by a researcher contracted by the TDSB. The report was glowing and highlighted many of the successes of the change. It also provided a literature review, which seemed to provide a great deal of outside support for the change.

However, after parents’ groups got hold of the report, issues began to arise. Specifically, they targeted a literature review that was separate from the main report update. 

According to an analysis performed by University of Toronto economics professor Marcin Peski, parts of the literature review were heavily plagiarized.

To that end, Peski says that some 20% of the report’s 90 citations were fake and more than half the text had been plagiarized without attribution or any indication of quoting. 

A spokesperson for the TDSB acknowledged the issues and said that the researcher involved, who has not been named, is no longer contracted by the board. That said, the spokesperson said that the review contained information, “from dozens of reputable sources, including leading academic researchers in the field of education,” and called the citation issues a distraction.

Critics of the program, however, say that they feel vindicated by the findings and are calling for a full, transparent audit of the program. 

In the end, this is a very bad look for the TDSB, especially as they work to defend a controversial program. However, things begin to look even worse when you peer into the TDSB’s history on the topic.

Understanding the Plagiarism

The plagiarism in this case is fairly straightforward. Though it seems to be limited to just a literature review that was delivered with the report, it’s pretty clear that it was not written in an ethical manner.

With over half the text copied and not fully cited and 20% of the citations being fake, it’s pretty clear that the review has some serious flaws. Those flaws are strong enough that Peski has raised questions about whether it was written using ChatGPT or a similar AI.

To be clear, the TDSB is correct that these issues, as of right now, appear to be limited to the literature review. This does not impact the update itself though, quite clearly, it does call that report into question as well.

In short, it’s perfectly possible that the report was done with the best of intentions, that its findings were genuine, and that the issues are limited to this, ultimately supplemental, material.

However, that doesn’t really help the TDSB’s case. 

The TDSB is a school board. It oversees schools and issues of academic integrity. If anyone should have been on top of these issues, it should have been the TDSB. I’m sure that this is not the example that they want to set for the students under their care.

Pair that with the fact that this program has been controversial and is being watched closely by various parents groups. A close examination of this report was inevitable, and the board should have been prepared for it. 

This is especially true when one considers that, judging from the kind of plagiarism, even a fairly basic plagiarism check should have raised enough red flags to halt publication. 

But then things get even worse when one realizes that this isn’t the first major run in the TDSB has had with plagiarism. 

In fact, the worst part may be how little the TDSB learned from a decade ago.

Unlearned Lessons

Simply put, this isn’t the first time that the TDSB has been rocked by a plagiarism scandal. 

In 2013, their director of education, Chris Spence, resigned from his post following a plagiarism scandal. Initially, he was accused of plagiarizing a column he wrote for the Toronto Star but, as the scandal spread to other works of Spence’s, he eventually chose to resign.  

Though that scandal is now a decade old, it should still be fresh in the mind for many who work at TDSB and, even if it’s not, changes in policy and procedure since Spence’s resignation should have (and could have) prevented this latest scandal.

In short, it’s clear that the TDSB learned nothing from its ordeal 10 years ago and is now being burned again. This proactively destroys any hope that the TDSB will learn and improve from this latest incident, as they didn’t the first time, even as it cost one of their top executives his career.

Though the TDSB has separated themselves from the researcher, a report that should have been supportive of their policy is now mired in integrity issues and, no matter how valid the findings may be, the report is easily dismissed by critics.

Bottom Line

Watching the TDSB repeat the same mistake, not performing due diligence on public-facing material, is brutal. 

To be clear, it’s unlikely even a perfect report with no issues would have convinced the policy’s detractors to change their mind. However, parents who are unsure about the policy or supportive of it may have rallied around it.

Now, however, it’s ammunition for the detractors. Even if the core of the report is fine, anyone who cites it supporting the program is going to have the integrity issues thrown back at them.

If the goal of this report was to provide evidence supporting the policy change, it failed. It made a difficult situation that much more complex.

And it could have been easily avoided. Though a simple plagiarism check may not have highlighted all the issues found in it, it should have caught enough to stop it from being published without further investigation. 

While the plagiarism is definitely the fault of the unnamed researcher, the TDSB has to take their own responsibility for both not performing their due diligence on the report and not learning their lessons from ten years ago.