First Nations Education: Will Rejection of the Latest Initiative Signal the End for Top-Down Devolution?

The mysterious hand of the Canadian Indian Act is still present in First Nations communities, and is particularly evident in the realm of education. Until the late 1960s, schooling for First Nations children and youth was essentially “assimilationist.” “The primary purpose of formal education,” as stated in the report of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, “was to indoctrinate Aboriginal peoples into a Christian, European world view, thereby ‘civilizing’ them” (Canada 1996, vol. 3, chap. 5, 2). Since the publication of “Indian Control of Indian Education” by the National Indian Brotherhood in 1972, over 40 years ago, policy changes in the form of federal-local education agreements, authorized under SGAs, for the most part have only reinforced the status quo of top-down, albeit partially delegated, federal control over education (Fallon and Paquette 2012, 3).

Conformity with mainstream society, competition, and preparation for the workforce were viewed as the only way forward for all Canadian children and youth, including Aboriginals. Such assumptions effectively limited the scope of First Nations children’s educational, cultural, and social life by failing to recognize the legitimacy of Aboriginal holistic learning and indigenous knowledge (Marie Battiste 2002). Policies advocating the assimilation of Aboriginal students and, later on, their integration into provincial or non-Aboriginal schools were the prescriptions for “normal” educational provisions and practices deemed necessary to integrate children and youth into a hierarchically ordered, pluralist state (J.D. Moon 1993 ).

Modifications to the Indian Act regime merely perpetuate the status quo in terms of federal dominance over First Nations peoples. In such a hierarchical social order, students are being prepared for a world still dominated by federal officials or indirectly managed by a chief and band council acting at the behest of the agents of non-Aboriginal society. Whatever their traditional authority might have been,” American political scientist J. Donald Moon once wrote, the chief has “come to owe his power mainly to his relationships to the ruling stratum” (Moon, 15).

Managed devolution of power over education to First Nations  amount to extending federal oversight in education governance. Authority is delegated sufficient to meet the minimum standard of First Nations control in principle, but not in actual practice. Since about 1980, federal policy has promoted First Nations control of education in the context of a model of integration in which First Nations students are permitted to enrol in provincial school systems offering educational services and programs.

In addition, First Nations control over education has been gradually ceded to delegated education authorities as part of a larger strategy of fostering economic development in First Nations communities. Although presented as a means of decolonization, the federal and provincial governments have promoted self-government and local control primarily as a way of encouraging First Nations to give up traditional ways and enter the market society. Such experiments in devolution, as Gerald Fallon and Jerry Paquette aptly observe, have merely substituted a new form of neo-colonialism” that is “deeply rooted in a denial of First Nations peoples’ capacity to formulate their own conceptions of person and society” (2012, 12).

Recent federal-local agreements negotiated as part of the devolution movement in Nova Scotia and British Columbia look promising, but — through control of the purse — actually might perpetuate the hegemony of the federal and provincial governments over First Nations communities. With a few exceptions, the SGAs provide limited devolution of power framed within what Fallon and Paquette term “the municipal model of self-government.” Some administrative autonomy is ceded, but only within limits set by outside educational authorities controlled by federal and, mostly, provincial governments.

Despite appropriating the public language of First Nations empowerment, the real changes necessary to extend authentic “Aboriginalization” of education seem to be absent on the ground in First Nations communities and their schools. A decade ago, a report by Cynthia Wesley-Esquimault aptly entitled Reclaiming the Circle of Learning and written for the Ontario Assembly of Chiefs, warned that history was in danger of repeating itself in that recent shifts in the direction of devolution did not amount to fundamental change (Wesley-Esquimaux, 2004).

The proposed 2013 First Nations Education Act was the latest mutation of devolution. Under the guise of supporting devolution, the federal government proposed to establish what amounted to a new system appropriating the provincial school board model, with significant strings attached. Despite the friendly sounding rhetoric, the legislation sought to fill the supposed void at the centre of the “non-system” of First Nations education (Canada 2013c). Confronted with what was depicted as a “fractured mirror” in education governance, Ottawa opted to nudge First Nations in the direction of creating more confederated boards to manage the more than 550 First Nations schools scattered across Canada’s ten provinces.

Introducing a school board model, however, likely would curtail, rather than advance, the movement to community-based schools. A study for the Canadian School Boards Association, conducted from December 2010 to November 2011, raised red flags about the impact of centralization on the state of local democratic control in Canada’s provincially regulated school boards. Surveying national trends over the past two decades, the authors conclude that “the significance of the school district apparatus in Canada has diminished as provincial governments have enacted an aggressive centralization agenda” (Sheppard et al. 2013, 42).

In another paper, Gerald Galway and a Memorial University research team claim that democratic school board governance is in serious jeopardy because trustees and superintendents now operate in a politicized policy environment that is “antagonistic to local governance” (Galway et al. 2013, 27–28). Elected school boards subscribing to a corporate policy-making model have also tended to stifle trustee autonomy and to narrow the scope of local, community decision-making (Paul W. Bennett 2012).

The 2013 First Nations Education Act was rejected for good reason. Proposing conventional school board governance in First Nations communities will only impose a new set of system-wide standards and accountabilities while withholding curriculum autonomy and thwarting the introduction of holistic learning, Indigenous knowledge, and heritage languages.

*Adapted from Paul W. Bennett and Jonathan Anuik, Policy Research Paper, Northern Policy Institute (Sudbury and Thunder Bay, ON, forthcoming,  September 2014).

What lessons can be learned from the rejection of the 2013 Canadian First Nations Education Act?  Is the conventional image of First Nations education governance as a “fractured mirror” an accurate one?  Does the shelving of the federal intiative signal the death knell for top-down devolution? What’s stopping policy-makers from building a new model from the First Nations communities upward?

 

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The Summer Learning Slide: Would Guided Study Programs Make a Difference?

The dog days of mid-summer are upon us and the usual stories are appearing about the chronic issue of Summer Learning Slide for students of all ages.  Canadian education blogger Andrew Campbell recently aptly described it as “the annual hand wringing over Summer Learning Loss.”  His analysis of the situation is deadly accurate: It’s  something people complain about but little changes. The issue’s been around for over 30 years and along the way developed it’s own cottage industry with guidebooks,  a national Summer Learning PD conference, and a well funded TD Bank Summer Reading Club.

Today’s parents are targeted with ads and articles warning them not to let their children ‘waste’ their summer.  Many Canadian independent schools and some public schools get in on the act as they send students off with summer reading lists to prepare them for next year’s curriculum. For some reason, that’s where most public school educators draw the line.  It’s as if the summer was sacrosanct and essentially a “no schoolwork zone.”  Indeed, the whole summer is left to summer camp operators and enterprising educators who offer very stimulating private, for profit, study skills or learning discovery camps.

Much of the perennial public debate is consumed by promoters of  Year Round Schools and never gets to the nub of the matter.  If  Year Round schooling is a non-starter, let’s focus on more achievable alternatives. Why not, for example, consider the merits of providing greatly improved, publicly-funded, guided summer study programs, sparking student engagement in reading, mathematics, science, and creative discovery.

Summer Learning Loss is real, not imagined, and it affects student academic performance.   Simply put, it’s the loss of academic skills and knowledge over summer vacation. It’s measured by testing students in math and reading before they leave for summer vacation, retesting them after vacation and comparing the scores. A Fall 1996 literature review summarizing 39 studies found that, on average, students lose about a month of learning skills and knowledge each summer. By graduation an average student has lost about a year of progress due to Summer Learning Loss.

Students experience the most severe Learning Loss in cumulative subjects. Mathematics loss is greatest, with an equivalent of 2.6 months of math progress lost each summer or two and a half years by graduation. Loss in reading scores varies by socioeconomic status as students from low-income families lose about 2 months of reading progress each summer, while students from middle-income families actually gain. Over the years, the cumulative effect of the difference in summer experiences between low and middle-income families begins to have an impact. It becomes a is a major contributor to the widening  achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic status.

Summer camp entrepreneurs have been very savvy in identifying the need and in incorporating summer learning programs into their range of program options. Affluent parents raising children to be “university bound” see the Summer Learning Loss as a challenge to be overcome and have the resources to minimize its impact on their children.  It’s truly ironic that such families are more concerned than others about  children are falling behind in their learning over those idle, zoned-out, electronic-game dominated summer months.

High cost summer camps or family excursions with edutainment value may not be what explains the difference between the learning retention of middle and lower income students.  A recent study by McMaster University researcher Scott Davies reported that middle income students spend the summer with adults who read to them and use adult vocabulary in conversations. “It’s the daily conversations that are sophisticated and expand children’s vocabularies, and being read to regularly by seasoned readers, one-on-one. This informal role-modeling is available to affluent children seven days per week. Less advantaged children, in contrast, have less constant exposure to those quality resources.”

Guided summer study and reading programs can help to arrest and even reverse  Summer Learning Loss. Dr. Davies led a pilot project that targeted struggling low-income readers in Ontario with summer literacy camps. These 2-3 week camps provided the exposure these students were previously missing and in response, rather than losing reading skills they improved by one and a half months.

Growing numbers of American educators are stepping into the breach and addressing Summer Learning Loss.  California educator Larry Ferlazzo, for example, now provides summer courses online providing what amounts to a virtual summer school for his students. After watching his high school district summer school numbers drop from thousands to only four classes, he took steps to bridge the learning gap for his high school students. That’s being pro-active.

Given the mounting research on Summer Learning Loss, educational policy-makers would be well-advised to focus more of their attention on minimizing its impact upon student achievement.  Provincial and state governments spend millions on school improvement initiatives, including professional development, standardized testing and  the IT latest resources, all focused on closing the “achievement gap” over 10 months of the year. What if… some of those resources were invested in developing and offering summer study and reading programs, teacher-guided and online, to address the summertime loss of student knowledge and skills.

Why has the problem of Summer Learning Loss proven so difficult to address in public education systems?  With the rise of virtual schools and online learning, why do the summer months remain essentially “dead zones” for school system extended learning initiatives?  Given the resistance to Year Round Schools, why not put more of  our energies and resources into providing more accessible publicly-funded guided summer study programs?

 

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Personalized Learning: Is the Latest “21st Century Learning” Cant More Illusory than Real?

“Personalized learning” is the latest iteration of “21st Century” innovation in education. Since 2010, it has emerged to fill what New Zealand education commentator Benjamin Riley aptly termed “an empty vessel” in the peculiar world of global education reform. Into that vessel can be poured any number of theories of learning or pet educational policies. “A term that can mean anything,” he warns us, “often signifies nothing.”

If “personalized learning” turns out to be more illusory than real, then North American school districts from “Crossroads of the Future” County (Iredall, NC) to the Province of British Columbia are embarked upon an experimental  education project of little substance and destination unknown. In the case of Canada’s Pacific province, that would be catastrophic coming in the wake of the current prolonged and bitterly divisive BC Teachers’ Strike.  At the very least, the growing concerns being raised about the wisdom and practicality of “Personalized Learning” should be enough to slow down, if not, derail, the latest educational bandwagon movement.

The B.C. Education Plan known as “Personalized Learning,” hatched in 2010 and implemented starting in 2012, is an ambitious  attempt to answer the call for “bold innovation” in public education. Inspired, in part, by Sir Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED Talks and supported by Pearson International, the world’s largest global learning corporation, it is in the vanguard of such projects worldwide.

In the rather grandiose BC Learns vision, progressive education pioneered by Chicago Lab School educator John Dewey has been ‘rebranded” for the 21st century. The new educational cant is a familiar one: “The greater value of education for every student is not in learning the information but in learning the skills they need to successfully find, consume, think about and apply it in their lives.” Such individualized learning will allow students to apply learned skills to real-world scenarios, says B.C. Education Minister Peter Fassbender.

Technology and ‘teaching machines’ rather than students seem to lie at the centre of the latest educational change movement. What its promoters seem to mean by “personalized learning” is that it should involve using technology to give students more freedom to control their education experience.  That sounds good, but what does it mean in practice?  American “Disruptive Innovation” theorist Clayton Christensen, provides this answer: “Blended learning involves leveraging the Internet to afford each student a more personalized learning experience, meaning increased student control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of his or her learning.”

We must “empower learners to learn any time, any place and at any pace, both in school and beyond,” proclaims the recent Aspen Institute report, Learners at the Center of the Networked World.  “Instead of organizing students by age and giving them all the same lesson, [students may] initiate their own learning, may follow different paths, and seek varied resources to help them meet their goals,” according to Alex Hernandez of the  Charter Schools Growth Fund.

The central arguments mobilized in support of such initiatives are highly suspect. Benjamin Riley’s recent June 20, 2014 commentary, “Don’t Personalize Learning,” exposed the fallacies associated with two of the core assumptions: (1) Students will learn more if they have more flexibility to choose their own “path” and what to learn (“the path argument”); and (2) students will learn more if they have more power over when they learn (“the pace argument”). Both of these assumptions, it might be noted, are also cardinal principles of the failed “progressive education” movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

First, the “path argument “assumption that students always benefit from “constructing knowledge” is at odds with what we know about cognition or knowledge acquisition. Most of the educational research demonstrates that knowledge is cumulative. What a child is capable of learning depends upon her stage of development and what she already knows. When a child encounters new information, lacking the preexisting knowledge to put the information in context, she invariably becomes frustrated and finds it difficult to learn.  When learning is “personalized” students are left more on their own, and many – perhaps most-  are not really properly equipped to make sense of new information. Allowing students to “pick what comes next” may be fashionable, but professional teachers are still, for the most part, better at guiding student paths to learning.

Second, the problem with “the pace argument” is that it runs counter to cognitive science research.  We now know that the human brain is not naturally built to think. Students, left to their own devices, tend to choose ‘the easy route’ and to avoid thinking. That’s because thinking is hard and many students need to be challenged to raise their sights.  Introducing technology may promote more student engagement, but it’s a safe bet that many will continue to shy away from activities that they find hard and unpleasant. The “fun’ of initial discovery can be short-lived when it comes to applying those ‘learnings’ to solving deeper, more complex problems.

Registering such sound objections to “personalized learning” opens skeptics like me up to charges that you are archaic in your thinking or worse, wedded to the old “factory model” of education.  Defenders of futuristic education also jump to the conclusion that you are against technology in schools. Such allegations levelled at critics like Riley and Dan Willingham, author of Why Don’t Kids Like School?” are patently false. Indeed, most of the leading critics are also attuned to the need to integrate ICT effectively and meaningfully  into today’s classrooms.

Personalization of learning is foundering, particularly in BC, because it is founded more upon progressive ideology than on sound, research-based pedagogy. Promoters of Personalized Learning in B.C. and Iredell County, NC, are implementing a pedagogical theory that runs counter to what we now know about how the mind works. If, as Dan Willingham has demonstrated, “children are more alike than different in how they think and learn,” then the whole initiative has been launched on a false set of assumptions. Betting big on Personalized Learning believing it will improve student learning is foolhardy in the face of cognitive science evidence to the contrary.

Signs are emerging in Canada that “Personalized Learning” is losing its allure.  A recent Nova Scotia School Boards Association (NSSBA) Discussion Paper,  written by Penny Milton and released in April 2014, appropriated much of the C21 Canada vision exemplified in Shifting Minds, but studiously avoided any mention of the BC iteration or any specific reference to “personalized learning.”  In spite of its claim to being “bold and innovative” in approach, it attempted to occupy the middle ground.  Much of the proposed NSSBA agenda was ‘boilerplate’ thinking stemming from the usual Canadian “research” sources, C21 Canada and  the Canadian Education Association. It’s also notably non-commital on student testing and assessment and focused mostly on rather mundane ‘in-the-box’ alternative programs.

What’s behind the recent appeal of Personalized Learning as an answer to the call for 21st Century innovation in education?   Why is Personalized Learning coming to be viewed as the progressive education cant re-branded for the 21st century classroom?  What are the chances that the BC Education Plan will actually work to improve student learning? Most importantly, how can we sensibly and effectively integrate IT into the classroom without completely dumbing-down curriculum and, once again, giving kids a virtual license to ‘do their own thing’ with questionable results?

 

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