First Nations education attacked in latest stories from "rethinking the reserves" series
Lessons in education from the Third World
Kevin Libin - February 07, 2008
Listen to James Tooley's stories about the places his studies in education have taken him and to some Canadians, they might sound strangely familiar. He has made a career visiting classrooms in the Third-World slums of Somalia, Zimbabwe, India, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, where abject poverty is the norm, parents have little -- if any -- higher education and children live in the most degraded conditions imaginable.
His international research team spends much of its time popping into classrooms unannounced, with some unsettling discoveries: In the government-run schools, they found some teachers asleep at their desks while students romped, unsupervised. Schools were found closed altogether, for weeks at a time, in the middle of the academic year. "Teachers wouldn't turn up, or if they did turn up they wouldn't teach," says Mr. Tooley, a leading educational researcher at England's Newcastle University. When researchers came calling on public schools in India, for example, only 53% of public schools were engaged in any form of "teaching activity," and in a third of public schools visited, principals were altogether absent.
For anyone acquainted with the state of First Nations schooling in this country, the parallels are hard to miss. Teachers who have returned from assignment on reserves have reported mouldy classrooms and unruly classes where actual teaching is often made virtually impossible by the lack of proper supervision, chaos and disarray.
Laurie Gough, a Canadian author who once taught at a reserve in northern Saskatchewan, recounted a story of how the "principal seemed to have permanently shut himself up in his office, even though most of the classes ... were completely out of control." Students from Canada's most troubled reserves frequently complain of schools so far out of hand they can scarcely get any work done.
Such anecdotal examples abound, but you needn't have first-hand experience in a reserve classroom to know that something is going terribly wrong with First Nations education, which is arguably the most critical thing to be getting right.
Data are scarce, but where they are available, academic outcomes for native students are utterly depressing: Dropout rates approach 60% according to the most recent Statistics Canada figures. In B.C., 34% of Grade 4 aboriginal students achieve results below grade expectations in reading skills, double the rate of non-aboriginals the same age, while the number of non-aboriginals that exceed Grade 4 expectations is three times higher than among aboriginal kids.
By Grade 10, even those who remain in school have only improved marginally, with more than 40% still functioning below curriculum standards in reading and writing, while the same is true for just 18% of non-aboriginal kids.
Yet in the most wretched corners of the impoverished world, Mr. Tooley has discovered something remarkable that may offer a model for troubled Canadian reserve school systems: a growing number of schools that are actually giving children a decent enough education that graduates regularly go on to technical schools and universities, enabling them to escape the destitution of their childhood.
These students, he discovered, were dropping out of the public system and moving instead into an exploding industry of private schools. In almost every village, at times run out of one-room shacks, parents were scraping together whatever money they could to get their kids out of the centrally run system and into a classroom where they stood a chance of gaining skills and escaping poverty.
In Nigeria's Lagos State, Mr. Tooley counted 75% of kids enrolled in private school. In Ghana: 64%. In Hyderabad, India, 65% of kids attend these private, unsubsidized schools.
"The very poor parents see the trouble with the government schools," he says in an interview from his research office in Hyderabad. "They find the solutions themselves."
Mr. Tooley found that in every setting, teacher absence rates at private schools were significantly lower and the amount of teaching activity drastically higher than in the public system. Even on such essentials as the availability of clean drinking water, toilets, desks, chairs, fans and lighting, the private schools were consistently superior to state-funded ones. Their pupils performed notably better, even after accounting for background variables: the average public school student in Lagos, for instance, scores 45% on math, while his private school peer scores 58%. In English, students in government-run schools average, again, 45% scores, while in the private system, kids average 64%.
In private schools across the Third World, standardized testing revealed similarly superior outcomes. If they didn't, after all, would indigent parents continue to squirrel away whatever money they could for tuition, books and uniforms, when the government already pays for a school offering dismal results?
"The key is schools have got to be accountable to parents. Only that way can you ensure that teachers show up, that they teach and respond to the kids," says Mr. Tooley.
In government systems, he points out, teachers and administrators get the same salary whether 1,000 children show up for class or zero children do, giving them little incentive to improve. The private school operators, dependent on the tuition to keep the lights on, have not only pioneered ways to motivate the most impoverished families to pay for education that is elsewhere offered for free, but they manage to do so at a fraction of the expense of the public system.
All other factors, Mr. Tooley insists-class-size, newer buildings, regulated curricula, teacher training and salaries -are secondary when it comes achieving quality compared with a school being held answerable for its results.
The research certainly goes a long way to explaining why, in Canada, schools have so badly failed in reserve communities; if there is one thing that is virtually non-existent in First Nations classrooms, it is accountability.
Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the 131-year-old Indian Act, which puts the federal government in charge of all native education, sticking First Nations with an unelected school boss far away in Ottawa. A 2003 survey for the Indian Affairs department found that just 13% of aboriginals thought the federal government should be in charge of setting school standards, with 72% preferring more nearby options, such as the province, the band itself, or an aboriginal school board - in other words, the same sort of local bodies that organize educational arrangements off-reserve.
Most Canadian parents enjoy local, elected school boards, to whom they can complain if they don't like how schools operate, replace unpopular trustees and, through their provincial government, demand policy changes if they choose.
Dissatisfied parents on a reserve generally have no such options. If their kids are bused to public schools off-reserve - as is frequently the case with smaller First Nations communities - aboriginal parents are not counted among the local ratepayers able to hold boards accountable through elections. If their children go to school on-reserve, they might turn to the chief and council for help, but when it comes to schools, as with much of everything else, band administrators don't report to their members, they report to the Ministry of Indian Affairs.
Compounding that is the fact that the federal government, in the last decade, has taken a hands-off approach to First Nations schooling, in part to distance itself as much as possible from the excessively interventionist approach of the old residential school system.
"In the spirit of self-government, Ottawa has abdicated any responsibility for monitoring outcomes in the education domain to the bands themselves," says John Richards, a public policy professor at Simon Fraser University and author of the 2006 C.D. Howe Institute report Creating Choices: Rethinking Aboriginal Policy.
So, First Nations-run schools are under no formal obligation to adhere to prescribed provincial curricula, or to grade students according to standardized educational paradigms. As a result, the federal auditor-general reported in 2004 that often, aboriginal students "do not perform at their current grade level, suggesting that they cannot transfer to the same grade in the provincial education system."
In B.C. and Ontario, children in First Nations-run schools generally don't write provincial standardized tests, but even in provinces where aboriginal performance results are measured, such as Alberta and Quebec, First Nations leaders have succeeded in keeping their schools' data from being made public, including to their own parents.
"The native leaders themselves say there is no need to make these results public, because it will only reinforce ... racist stereotype[s]," explains Peter Cowley, director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute.
In 2006, Mel Buffalo, head of the Indian Association of Alberta, defended the practice, telling reporters "it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out what the result is going to be. Everyone already knows the problems we face in First Nations society, so why make it look even worse?"
The only hard statistics available to the public come from B.C., the one province that releases the performance of aboriginal students enrolled in provincial schools, and from Statistics Canada data, which counts aboriginal high-school graduates. In other words, most First Nations parents in Canada not only lack influence over the way their kids are educated, they have little to judge even the quality of the education their children are getting.
Clearly, that must change. And there is reason to be optimistic that it can if you consider that the basis for a functional, progressive, innovative school system already exists. What it takes is giving First Nations parents control over how their kids are schooled. Right now, Ottawa sends education funds to bands, who decide how it will be allocated. If instead, the federal government put that money into the hands of parents, along the lines of a voucher or scholarship model - wherein funding follows parents to whatever form of schooling they select for their children - Mr. Tooley suggests it could well deliver something like the accountability and innovation to Canadian reserves that school choice has brought to the bleakest corners of the developing world.
Something like this model exists on many reserves already.
Most visibly, aboriginals who attend college or university already apply their federally provided tuition money to the institute of their choice, in the form of a scholarship, without bands feeling the need to directly administer post-secondary education themselves.
On the Simpcw First Nation, in B.C., Chief Keith Matthew adds an additional layer of accountability to the college scholarship funds by requiring that students sign contracts vowing to pass their courses or repay their tuition to the band.
"It forces the students to be accountable to us for the expenditure of those funds," he says.
It is important to band members, too, when tuition funds are limited and the Simpcw has a list of more than 30 students waiting for a shot to get into university. For the students, and the executive, "it's about being accountable," he says, "and accountability is the basis for good governance."
In lower grades too, some parents have been able to use federal money to open doors to some of the best schooling money can buy. Statistics Canada counted 2,000 aboriginal students using public money to pay tuition in private schools in 2001, the last year statistics were available.
Meanwhile, any portion of private-school tuition not covered by the funds, or by school bursaries, is picked up by First Nations families themselves, who, like the parents in Hyderabad that Mr. Tooley studied, evidently see the value of paying extra for private education.
When a few years ago this newspaper reported on the practice, Perry Bellegarde, then Chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and former regional chief responsible for education at the Assembly of First Nations, explained: "Education is a treaty right and we believe that right is portable."
It certainly should be. Still, as long as federal scholarship money is sent over the heads of families and to their band council, administrators will be the ones making choices on behalf of parents, meaning not every aboriginal family is entitled to that portability.
All too often, council decisions can be adulterated by political considerations, including the compunction to create jobs or fund legacy projects - a leaked 2004 federal report showed that barely 100 children were attending class at a school in Natuashish that cost $15-million to build - or simply to spend the money on things other than classrooms.
Much of the time, decisions about where children are schooled are made in the context of what works best for the First Nations band as a whole, rather than what parents consider best for their own children. That often leaves aboriginal kids missing out on what would otherwise be a significant opportunity to get access to better schooling.
In the dozen or so U.S. states where voucher systems have been tried, the results have been exceptional. In Wisconsin, for instance, a 2004 study by the Manhattan Institute revealed the kind of dramatic effect on results that opening up school choice can have. Graduation rates were disastrous in Milwaukee's public system, where the biggest challenge was improving results from kids in the black community. Among schools participating in the voucher program, graduation rates climbed from 36% to 64%.
In Ohio, when 2,000 low-income Cleveland families were given scholarship vouchers for primary school, a Harvard University study found that the performance for voucher students had improved, on average, 5% in reading skills and 15% in math, while two-thirds of participating parents reported being "very satisfied" with the academic quality of their school, compared with less than half that rate of satisfaction among unvouchered public-school parents.
Here in Canada, Alberta came closest to implementing a voucher-style system in 1994, by passing legislation that permits students to attend their choice of public or privately run charter schools, with the government picking up much, if not most, of the bill. Students there now outperform any other province on achievement tests, and routinely rank in the top five jurisdictions in the world according to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment.
Notably, PISA reported in December that Alberta's is the only school system in the world where immigrant students - who, like many aboriginal children, face language and cultural barriers that necessitate tailored teaching methods - demonstrated no difference in achievement with their non-immigrant counterparts.
"I'd welcome anything that's better than the system that we have now," says Dave Tuccaro, who says he recently attended a high school convocation of just two graduates at his home First Nation of Mikisew Cree, a community of about 2,000 near Fort Chipewyan, Alta. As the owner of a multi-million dollar contracting and trucking business in Fort McMurray, Mr. Tuccaro was able to send his own kids to elite private schools off-reserve.
"Education has to be the number one priority, period," he says. "We need to do whatever it is to educate kids to a point where they're employable." Once people can get jobs, he believes, many of the social and economic challenges faced by First Nations can only shrink.
One of Mr. Tuccaro's current projects, in fact, is setting up a private boarding school, the Leadership Academy, which he hopes will draw aboriginal students from around Northern Alberta by focusing not only on academics and discipline, but offering mentorship from business and cultural leaders. Since he expects that federal school transfers may not completely cover costs, Mr. Tuccaro says he is working with businesses in the Fort McMurray area to help out.
In his part of the world particularly, but nearly everywhere else in the country, corporate Canada finds itself with a profound interest in ensuring that aboriginal children get a better education. Alberta is already undergoing an acute labour shortage, and by 2025, when today's grade-schoolers finish college (or don't), the Conference Board of Canada projects that the province will be short 330,000 workers. Two-thirds of Canadian firms surveyed by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in the fall say they are suffering shortages, 90% of which are considered severe.
Worse, the workforce participation rate is projected to plummet over the next 25 years, according to Statistics Canada: right now about 67% of people over the age of 15 are working; in 2030 that number could be 58%. To cope, businesses have begun hiring abroad to fill gaps, bringing guest workers from the Philippines, India, China and Venezuela; in total, the country imported 172,000 foreign workers in 2006, a 122% increase over 10 years.
Meanwhile, unemployment rates on Canada's reserves approach 30%. Even for aboriginals living in urban centres, unemployment is three times what it is in the non-aboriginal population. And over the next decade, the working-age population in First Nations communities will grow as much as five times faster than among non-natives. "If Canada wants to remain as a prosperous and competitive nation, we have to have those young people in the workforce," says Calvin Helin, a Vancouver-based aboriginal lawyer and advocate for reforming First Nations policies.
Several Canadian businesses have already shown themselves eager to pitch in, and could almost certainly be counted on to get involved in a more deregulated educational system.
At Grandview/Uuqinak'uuh Elementary, in Vancouver, B.C., where about 50% of students are aboriginal, former principal Caroline Krause was able to convince the Royal Bank, Starbucks, the Home Depot and Nike to donate thousands of dollars in money and equipment to the school to fund literacy programs, computer labs, homework clubs, after-school programs, playgrounds and outdoor education, but had to overcome opposition from teachers unions to do it.
Ms. Krause doesn't hesitate to give credit to her corporate partners - though she gives it first to a group of inspired teachers and some important curriculum changes - for turning a school on the verge of being shuttered into a success: In 2005, the number of Grade 4 students at Grandview/Uuqinak'uuh reading at or above their grade level reached 75%, compared with just 22% in 2001; the same test results rose from 42% to 88% in numeracy skills. The number of Grade 7 students at or above the appropriate grade level more than doubled from 40% to 92% in reading, and 38% to 100% in numeracy, pushing the school's ranking in the annual Fraser Institute report card from 1.6 to 7 out of 10.
For businesses in the community, "it's money well spent," Ms. Krause says. "How many dozens of children we kept off the streets. We were able to keep them in a safe environment and we helped them with their academics."
It is hard to overstate the implications of such things. With a national dropout rate at barely 8%, Canadians as a whole can well be satisfied with a school system that appears to work well enough most of the time. For aboriginal communities, however, when students drop out because they are failing, because they are recruited by gangs, because they are disengaged or because they simply don't see the point, the impacts are lifelong, and frequently disastrous.
Consider: The average aboriginal woman who makes it into university will make about $1-million in total lifetime earnings, according to a recent study by University of Saskatchewan economist Eric Howe. If she drops out? She'll make less than $90,000 over the course of her entire life.
"Education is the most important single thing to do properly in terms of improving aboriginal [social and economic] outcomes," says Mr. Richards, author of the Rethinking Aboriginal Policy report.
But after more than a century of trying, Canada's approach to First Nations education has managed almost nothing properly. The impulse among native leaders and politicians has been to simply spend more on the system, while continuing to ignore the critical issues of accountability. Getting out of that rut surely requires seeking solutions that have not been tried before, rather than heading down the same doomed route. And if a system where parents have choice between private and public offerings, a system where schools are made more accountable, has given kids hope in even the most squalid slums of the Third World, it should certainly be worth trying here.
+++++++++++
'Strugle and emerge' - Are private schools the answer for Canada's struggling native kids?
Kevin Libin - February 07, 2008
You may have heard of Wilcox, Sask., for one of two reasons. The village is home to the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, a top-drawer private school and incubator for some of the finest hockey players to ever put stick to ice. Also, Liberal MP Ralph Goodale grew up there. But who cares about that, when Wilcox helped launch careers for NHL heroes Wendel Clark, Rod Brind'Amour, Curtis Joseph, Vincent Lecavalier and Brad Richards?
Wilcox is 5,000 km from Sheshatshiu. Labrador's largest Innu community, you may have caught wind of Sheshatshiu some years back when reporters profiled its unfortunate distinction of having Canada's youngest, most pitiful addicts: six-year-olds huffing gasoline.
Wilcox might as well be a different world from Sheshatshiu -- exactly what Atshapi Andrew required.
"My mom knew I had to move to change schools in order to get my education," the Grade 11 Notre Dame student says. At school in Sheshatshiu, many students couldn't understand English. "My friends drank back home. And some days you wouldn't see them there. Some days they would come smelling like booze," he says. "It was a very up and down kind of school.... Some days you couldn't even do any work."
Notre Dame, Grades 9 through 12, may be as renowned among First Nation parents as it is among hockey fanatics, as a place where young aboriginals have come for decades to get a superior education.
Notre Dame aims to ensure that "100% of our graduates are eligible to attend university," explains David Howie, the school's president.
In a given year, estimates Patricia Selinger, the school's registrar, there might be as many as several dozen students from First Nations as far away as B.C. and the Maritimes, not an insignificant number for a school of roughly 300, offering little by way of native culture, deeply imbued with Catholic values -- Sunday Mass is mandatory -- and charging tuition running $17,000 a year for in-province students and nearly $24,000 for those outside.
"I'm sure every main leader from all the main bands has sent their kids here. We've had the Fontaines, the Bellegardes, the Sandersons, the Montours and Hills from the Six Nations, the Ahenakews, the Goodstrikers from Alberta," says Terry O'Malley, the school's former president who taught there since 1978. "It was never intended that would be a special niche for the school," Mr. Howie says. He suspects the reputation among First Nations began in the '30s when Olive Dickason, a Métis from Manitoba, met Athol Murray, a priest whose devotion to sports, classics and the Almighty made Notre Dame what it is (his personal credo: "God, Canada, and hockey -- not necessarily in that order.") "Père" Murray -- as he was, and still is, affectionately known, although he died in 1975 -- admitted Ms. Dickason to Notre Dame, a school focusing as much on rigorous liberal education as sports (in addition to its Olympic-size hockey rink, the school boasts several rare 15th and 16th century European manuscripts that would make Ivy League universities jealous). Ms. Dickason would become one of the country's most prominent First Nations historians and a member of the Order of Canada, happily crediting the school for her success.
Ever since, aboriginal students have been coming to Wilcox, some for hockey, or the strong football and baseball programs, and some for other reasons.
"I went to Notre Dame because I was a bad ass," says Shauneen Pete, vice president of academics at the First Nations University of Canada. A member of Saskatchewan's Little Pine First Nation, Ms. Pete says she had stopped attending her Regina public school in the 1980s as she struggled with her aboriginal identity, and began hanging out instead in pool halls on the wrong side of town.
Her university-educated parents packed her up -- she admits she didn't go willingly -- and sent her to Notre Dame. Had it not been for that, says Ms. Pete, now a PhD, "I certainly would have had a very different story. When I think about the people who I hung around with in grade 10, there's a number of them who aren't here anymore."
Back then, aboriginals received funding for private schools directly from the government. When Ottawa downloaded educational matters to band councils in the early '90s, First Nations enrolment at Notre Dame dropped dramatically as bands created their own schools.
"Families were coming back to us after two or three years saying they were not happy," recalls Ms. Selinger, the longtime registrar. "Their children were not getting the strong education they had been getting here. They were doing a lot of native studies but not enough of the other things that were important academically."
Today, she's invited to reserves by students' parents to promote the school to fellow members. "I think these families want to show it's really possible that you can actually get access to this wonderful and unique educational opportunity away from home," she says.
On rare occasions band funds subsidize tuition, with parents paying room and board. But chiefs generally resist, preferring education dollars stay on reserve, leaving parents on their own. Students Gisele and Jillene George, of the English River First Nation, say their mom was so set on seeing them graduate Notre Dame she moved their family to Wilcox, seven hours away from their Meadow Lake home just so they could afford to attend (students not boarded pay $5,670 a year).
However they get here, Notre Dame "Hounds" past and present say the school, with its emphasis on independence and achievement, is nothing like the public or reserve schools back home.
"It's just a lot easier to learn here ... they keep you focused. I think this is one of the best learning environments in Canada," says current student John McKay, a member of Saskatchewan's Lac La Ronge Indian Band. "La Ronge really isn't the greatest place to develop a strong future."
At Notre Dame, "there was no offering of remedial courses," as in public schools, recalls alumnus Jason Goodstriker, former Regional Chief of Alberta for the Assembly of First Nations and member of the Blood tribe. "You had to pass all the [top-level] courses. And the teachers would sit up and work with you until you did."
If he can manage tuition for his own kids, Mr. Goodstriker says "there would be no question" he would enroll them when the time comes.
But he and other alumni worry that without access to the funds they had, aboriginal kids are denied an important educational experience. "It was one of the places that set me on the right path," says Gary Daniels, an alumnus from Mistawasis First Nation, now general manager of the Dakota Dunes casino near Saskatoon. "I believe there are still kids out there that if they had the shot that I had and my brothers had that they could really make something of it."
Tom Dustyhorn, financial manager at Kawacatoose First Nation, says his parents could never have sent him to Notre Dame without financial help. Yet, he believes his Alma Mater's Latin motto, "Luctor et Emergo" -- struggle and emerge -- especially relevant for aboriginal kids, who often must transcend challenging circumstances. Reserves could only benefit from more graduates bringing home with them that attitude, Mr. Dustyhorn believes. "The more role models we have, obviously, that's what will mean a turnaround for First Nations."
National Post klibin@nationalpost.com