Education department marginalizes Nunavut students

It appears to me that the Department of Education is continuing to marginalize the students of Nunavut.

By opting out of standardized testing, the message the minister of education and the department is giving to Nunavummiut is that we are not capable of meeting standards that everyone else in Canada is capable of and expected to meet.

The argument about the examples in the testing “not being relevant to Nunavummiut” is really getting old. Canada is a truly vast country, and I find it hard to believe that cherry pickers in B.C. know anything about fishing in Newfoundland, yet you don’t hear either of those two provinces complaining about the relevance of examples in standardized testing.

When is the GN going to start resolving problems instead of complaining about them? Why not work with the writers of the standardized testing to include some Nunavut relevant examples? Let’s see if the farmers in southern Saskatchewan complain about determining the area of an ice-floe versus the area of a barn.

I am sure that teachers across Nunavut could provide some excellent examples that could be used. The GN is very good at whining and complaining and I am getting rather sick of it.

I want my children to have the best education possible, so that they will have options to live and work wherever they choose. I want to be sure that my children’s education is as good or better than the rest of Canada. Standardized testing helps ensure this.

If the GN continues to opt out of standardized testing, our children may very well not be able to live and work anywhere else but Nunavut. Is this the long-term Inuit employment plan for the GN to reach their goal of 85 per cent Inuit on staff?

Do they want to keep the educational academic standards low so our children will not be able to gain access to post-secondary education or meaningful employment outside of Nunavut?

Nunavut and our children deserve better than this.

Vicki Aitaok
Cambridge Bay