Native Charter Schools Eyed

A national conference on aboriginal education, opening in Calgary today, is looking at the experience of overseas schools for clues to boost Canada’s poor education rates on reserves.

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Prairie-based think-tank, is bringing together experts from Hawaii and Canada’s only indigenous charter school near Edmonton, among others, to look at opening more charter schools.

For Manitoba, the conference, Expanding Choices in Aboriginal Education, offers a key to flip a poor education system into a great one, said commissioner James Wilson of the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba, who is opening the conference.

“What the research around the world is showing more and more is that you have to have exceptionally high expectations. And you have to recognize the culture and language of the students. Those three things combined end up increasing literacy and (science skills) among indigenous students,” Wilson said Thursday.

That’s really no different from public schools, only the focus won’t be mainstream culture and English or French as the only languages.

For indigenous students, the emphasis shifts away from a mainstream focus to an indigenous one.

The approach could be based on projects that use applied math, science, history and language to teach concepts kids haven’t picked up in classrooms.

In the United States, charter schools have state funding for Latino and African-American students with a focus on themes such arts or science, Wilson said.

In Canada, charter schools would have to take into account labour unions (most American charter schools shut out unions) but they offer something public schools don’t: adaptability, Wilson said.

“We’re not doing a good job now, so let’s look at what they’re doing in Hawaii, in New Zealand, in South Korea. Let’s try things,” Wilson said.

In February, a national panel concluded education was failing students in Canada’s 633 First Nations.

The graduation rate on reserves is less than half that of kids off reserve, the panel reported, and kids without a high school diploma are twice as likely to be unemployed and more likely to end up in trouble with the law.

In Manitoba, the statistics are even worse, Wilson said.

“I know in Manitoba the grad rate is 28 per cent on reserves. The provincial average is (more than) 86 per cent. That’s a huge difference,” Wilson said.

The national panel called for a First Nations education act to be in place by 2014 along with funding parity: Reserve schools limp along with half to one-third the funding of provincial schools