Betrayal by negligence

“Failure to adequately monitor and maintain the quality of education in the Arctic is, in my view, an act of negligence that has contributed more than any other single factor to the establishment of “structural racism.” At the present time, parents blame teachers, and teachers blame parents, for educational failure. But testing identifies the good and the poor among students, among households and parents, among classes and teachers, among schools and principals, and among communities and regions. When testing is done, the failures can be corrected with knowledge gained from the successes.”

—Colin Irwin: Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, published in 1989 by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee

Sound familiar?

Colin Irwin, a sociologist and former Kivalliq resident, wrote those words 13 years ago, in a research paper produced for the federal government that was re-published and widely circulated by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee.

His essay, Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, was ignored by those who ran the territorial school system at that time. Then, as now, no one wanted to hear ugly truths like this:

“Many white families with children of senior elementary and high school age try to transfer to Yellowknife, if they work for the GNWT, or move south, so that their children’s education will not suffer during these critical years. As a consequence, the children of white parents often receive a much better education than their Inuit counterparts and are, therefore, able to successfully complete a program of higher education in southern Canada.”

Or this:

“If current trends continue, most of the Inuit living in the Arctic in the year 2025 will be second-generation wards of the state, whose society, economy, and culture may have more in common with an urban slum than with the life their grandparents knew.”

But government officials at all levels, including the Nunavut government’s education department, have thus far provided us with no reason to believe that Nunavut’s future will differ much from Irwin’s dystopian vision. Judged by its actions, as opposed to its mendacious rhetoric, it’s Irwin’s Nunavut that the Nunavut government appears content to strive for, not the Disneyland world of the Bathurst Mandate.

Last week, Nunavut residents received more support for this view — the results of the latest in a series of national academic skill tests that the Council of Ministers of Education have been conducting since 1993.

The test’s designers created five levels of difficulty. Of those, “Level 2” was set as the desired target for 13-year-olds, and “Level 3” the desired target for 16-year-olds.

Even when you take into account that for many Nunavut students, English is a second language, the results are disgraceful. Only 8 per cent of Nunavut’s 13-year-olds met or exceeded the Level 2 target, compared with 64.4 per cent for the rest of Canada, in the content section of the test.

In the problem-solving section of the test, where weak English comprehension would be expected to pose a greater barrier for Nunavut students, only 2.3 per cent of Nunavut’s 13-year-olds met or exceeded Level 2. That’s compared to 67.6 per cent of 13-year-olds across Canada.

In other words, only two of every 100 13-year-olds in Nunavut are able to do what two-thirds of their counterparts in Canada are able to do. The results for Nunavut’s 16-year-olds are slightly better, but not by a significant margin.

These are tomorrow’s voting citizens and job-seekers. This is the generation from which the Nunavut government hopes to hire 80 per cent of its civil servants by 2020. The reality, however is that many, perhaps most, won’t even understand the simple numbers and comparisons used in this editorial.

Don’t blame the children however. Blame the system, and the self-serving hacks and mediocrities who have created and sustained it.

Those who run Nunavut’s school system will hasten to mention that their government is only three years old, and that it’s therefore unfair to measure its performance against education departments in affluent provinces such as Ontario and Alberta. Although there’s a grain of truth in this argument, it’s still a weak excuse.

Nunavut’s education department is not a new creation. It is part of a continuum. That continuum began in the late 1960s with the devolution of Arctic education from the federal government to the government of the Northwest Territories.

Nunavut’s department of education is staffed by many of the same people who ran the NWT’s school system in the Nunavut regions before 1999, whether they worked for the now-defunct divisional boards, or for the department itself. It employs many of the same teachers, principals, and administrators. It uses most of the policies and practices that existed before 1999, and until it’s amended or replaced, the same Education Act.

Most of all, it’s inspired by the same relentless avoidance of accountability.

As Irwin pointed out 13 years ago, accountability in education can be achieved only through regular testing and evaluation. Test results, as he said, can show us what works and what doesn’t. It’s an essential tool for teachers and administrators. It’s also an essential tool for students, because it provides an honest basis for the building of confidence and genuine self-worth.

Above all, it’s an essential tool for citizens, without which they cannot hold the education bureaucracy to account. That’s why the national tests run through the Student Assessment Indicator Program, or SAIP, are essential tools, despite their imperfections.

The first time around, no one could reasonably expect Nunavut students to perform as well as students in southern Canada. But the performance gap between Nunavut and the rest of Canada is so enormous, it cannot possibly be explained away by arguments that appeal to language and culture.

The children of Nunavut are the intellectual equals of children anywhere else in Canada. It demeans them to suggest that administrators, teachers and suspect educational policies are not to blame.

The people of Nunavut need better tools for holding the education bureaucracy to account for its work. That means Nunavut’s educators must not only do their own testing and evaluation of schools, teachers, and students, they must also be willing to report the results to the public honestly. Honesty may be a stretch for many GN bureaucrats. But the public must demand it in order to get the information needed to hold the department accountable.

There is a generation of trusting children passing through the Nunavut school system right now. The SAIP test shows that most will never get a chance to become accountants, auditors, computer programmers, economists or scientists. Most won’t even learn the math skills needed to pass a trades entrance exam.

Besides evaluating itself, the department must immediately work on finding ways to teach mathematics in Inuktitut, and take a hard look at all its teaching practices, including the dubious policy of not allowing Inuit students to study extensively in English until Grades 4 or 5.

Too many innocent people in Nunavut have already been betrayed by the negligence of unaccountable educators. It would be morally reprehensible for the department to allow this to continue.

JB