Berger yes – but with conditions

Thomas Berger’s report on Nunavut’s school system is now widely discussed and widely praised in Nunavut. A few people have even read it.

For his part, Jim Prentice, the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, says he wants to study it, study it, and then study it some more.

We hope he does just that. Although none of its findings and none of its prescriptions are new to most Nunavummiut, it could become a valuable tool for reforming education in Nunavut.

But if the federal government does decide to carry out Berger’s advice, it must do so with all due care and diligence. Berger recommends spending large amounts of new money on a bilingual education system, on top of $20 million in new short-term spending within the land claim agreement’s implementation contract.

So to ensure that Canada’s money isn’t poured into an unaccountable sink-hole, the federal government, before accepting Berger’s advice, must insist on two things: the creation of evaluation systems for Nunavut schools, and the elimination of damaging hiring practices at the Government of Nunavut.

Evaluation

In Chapter 6 of their 2002 book, Language in Nunavut: Discourse and Identity in the Baffin Region, Louis-Jacques Dorais and Susan Sammons reveal the damage that is done to bilingual school programs when the territorial government does not evaluate them and does not set clear standards.

They found that the Government of Nunavut does little evaluation. They found that students are not evaluated to find out what they know. They found that Inuit teachers are not evaluated to find out if they have the academic proficiency to teach subjects other than language. And they found that curricula and programs aren’t evaluated either.

“The fact that no systematic evaluation of language programs has ever been undertaken in Nunavut seems to suggest a widely shared willingness by the Department of Education and those controlling language policy to accept, at best, mediocre standards in Nunavut schools,” they wrote.

We also know that the GN does not now participate in a national system of standardized tests developed by the Council of Education Ministers.

That decision followed the release of results from a test in 2001 that measured the achievements of all 13-year-olds and all 16-year-olds in mathematics. Nunavut’s performance in that test, as expected, was the worst in the country, by an embarrassing margin.

But the purpose of such tests is not to help education officials, teachers, or pupils feel better about themselves. The purpose of such tests is to generate vital information.

That’s why evaluation is essential – it generates essential information. Without this information, no one can possibly know whether standards are met. Standards are supposed to tell you what you are expected to achieve, but without evaluation, standards become meaningless. Without evaluation, you have no way of knowing if standards are met.

Evaluation is therefore an essential tool for accountability. Without the information that evaluation systems generate, parents cannot know whether their children are learning what they are supposed to learn, and neither can their children. School administrators cannot know which teachers are doing a good job and which teachers aren’t, and therefore cannot identify those ineffective teachers who need to be either retrained or weeded out.

Administrators also cannot know if prescribed teaching methods and programs actually work. Neither can government officials, who cannot know if the money they spend is producing the government’s stated goals.

If the federal government decides that it’s in the public interest to give Nunavut large amounts of new money for a bilingual school program, it must do so only if the GN agrees to develop clear standards and systems for evaluation that show whether those standards are met.

The development of a federally-funded bilingual system will require lengthy negotiations between Nunavut and Ottawa. But Ottawa must make it clear, from the beginning, that the development of an evaluation system is a non-negotiable issue.

The GN’s record

In his report, Berger finds, more or less accurately, that the GN has “strived mightily to provide opportunities for virtually all qualified Inuit.” This is driven of course, by a numbers game: a game in which the GN is judged by the percentage of Inuit holding GN jobs.

Individual departments are judged the same way, producing intense competition among them for qualified Inuit employees.

But for those who play it, the game produces short-term achievements that lead to long-term damage. Berger points out that this game has become so intense, GN departments now do things that actually damage the quality of government services and undermine their own training efforts.

He says the most obvious example of this is the poaching of qualified Inuit by one department, at the expense of others. Though this may temporarily help the poaching department’s image, it does long-term damage to the government, especially when the affected employees find that there’s no support for them in their new jobs.

The greatest damage is done to the Department of Education, which has suffered the loss of numerous Inuit teachers, lured away into less stressful non-teaching jobs elsewhere in the government. The result? The Department of Education now loses more Inuit teachers every year than it is able to train. The resulting shortage of Inuit teachers is becoming a crisis.

So it would be foolish, obviously, for the federal government to put large amounts of new money into a bilingual education program if there is no one to teach it. Ottawa must insist that GN departments stop poaching teachers to fluff up their Inuit-hire numbers.

Another damaging GN practice is its habit of hiring promising young people before they get a chance to finish college or university. People with high school diplomas and perhaps a few college courses are recruited into highly-paid jobs without having to do much to show that they’re qualified for them. They’re given fancy job titles, such as “policy analyst,” while no one knows what they really do.

This well-intentioned but damaging practice creates a serious disincentive that actually defeats the long-term goal of Article 23. Why should anyone bother to put themselves through the many years of lonely struggle that lead to a bachelors’ or masters’ degree if they can get a $75,000-a-year job with a high school diploma or less?

Such disincentives would also defeat the purpose of a new bilingual education program, as well as the immediate $20 million that Berger recommends spending.

If the federal government does agree to carry out Thomas Berger’s advice, they must do so with all due care and diligence. And that includes ensuring that the GN will clean up its hiring practices. That too, ought to be a non-negotiable condition. JB