School daze

For more years than most Nunavut residents ever spend in high school, the Government of Nunavut has been working on a new education law.

It was in the fall of 1999 that James Arvaluk, then the minister of education, announced the GN would create a new Education Act for Nunavut, replacing the one we inherited from the Northwest Territories. (The GN’s “old” act, by the way, is actually fairly new, passed in the late 1990s.)

Within a year, there was an inevitable “consultation,” followed by another one a couple of years later. The GN’s first education bill went belly-up anyway.

In 2004, a new education minister, Ed Picco, stepped up to the plate. Like his predecessors, he’s had a long at-bat. As of this fall, Operation Education Act, northern Canada’s longest-running exercise in bureaucratic inertia, will enter its eighth year.

This means the people of Nunavut will have had eight years in which to talk to each other and to their government about education. It’s curious then, that after all this time, the elected members of Nunavut’s community school committees – now called “District Education Authorities” – should have waited so long to tell the world about what they want in a new education law.

It’s even more curious that they waited so long to say so little.

After meeting in Iqaluit for several days last month, representatives of Nunavut’s education authorities declared that they want more power and responsibility. They suggested that if the GN were to give that to them through a new education law, the school system would suddenly get a whole lot better.

But what do they want the power to do in the future that they can’t do now? They didn’t answer that question. What new responsibilities do they want? They didn’t answer that question. Do they want more money to pay bigger honoraria and support staff salaries? They didn’t answer that question.

They say they want community control of schools, but they said nothing about what they mean by such “control.” Does it mean the power to hire and fire teachers? The power to decide what is taught or not taught in classrooms? The power to decide how students are disciplined? The power to manage budgets? They didn’t say.

One thing is clear: until they do provide specific answers to specific questions, the education authorities need not be taken seriously. Even if the GN were sympathetic to the idea of communities gaining more power over their schools, the education authorities have done nothing to advance that idea. They have given the GN nothing to work with.

Most education authority members are ordinary people, well-meaning volunteers whose hard work is generally unappreciated within their communities. In some communities, education authority members gain their seats by acclamation – because so few people are interested in serving.

But they are also elected officials, and they are accountable to the public. It cost a lot of public money to fly their representatives to Iqaluit last month and accomodate them for four days. So far, the public has received little benefit from this investment of public funds.

They did, apparently, spend time making lists of all the good stuff they want to see happen in the future. This often happens at public meetings in Nunavut when people go wild with flip charts and magic markers. They say they want more high school graduates with “qualifications on par with the rest of Canada.” They say they want “more trilingual students.” They say they want better informed parents and community leaders. They want more qualified Inuktitut language instructors, and so on.

It was, however, an exercise in redundancy. GN officials, along with just about every other informed person in Nunavut, already know that large numbers of people already want such things.

The problem, as always, is how to get them. And to do that you need the wisdom to distinguish between what can be done now, what can be done only over many years, and what can never be done because it’s too impractical. It also means the wisdom to know that diverting money and energy away from classrooms and teachers, and into 25 separate administrative fiefdoms, may not be the best use of public money right now.

As for the Nunavut Education Act, version two, there’s no reason, other than shallow political symbolism, for the GN to be in any hurry about introducing a bill and getting it passed through the house.

A new education law will not make the school system any better or worse than it is now. A new education law will not provide the GN with more money for education, it will not provide the GN with better qualified teachers, and it will not provide the GN with better curricula.

Whatever improvements we need to make – and there are many – can already be accomplished through bigger budget allocations, better administrative decisions, and more productive work inside the education department, all of which can be done now under the authority of the current education act. – JB