Enhancing Educational Attainment for First Nations Children

Abstract

Education has been targeted as a key issue for both federal and provincial policy for the coming years. After the November 2005 meeting of First Ministers and Aboriginal leaders, a statement was released in which participants pledged to eliminate the gap in K–12 educational attainment by 2016.1 This policy decision is based on research foundations that document First Nations students as having patterns of lower educational achievement than the student population at large (King 1993, White and Maxim 2002). This lower attainment has been shown to be correlated with lower income (Maxim, White, and Beavon 2001), reduced well-being (Beavon and Cook 2003) and lower rates of labour force participation (White and Maxim 2002). Targeting education is also predicated on research indicating that there are real social and economic returns to improvements in human capital (White and Maxim 2003). This report is aimed at developing a proposal for using incentives to improve the use of diagnostics in basic skills learning by First Nations children. Our thinking is that if the acquisition of the basic academic skills is problematic, then the problems of attainment, particularly at the high school level, may be explicable. Through encouraging the use of standardized testing of First Nations students, the problems and successes in skills transfer will be exposed. This may lead to improvements in both teaching methods and curriculum content over time. This report has six aims: 1. To clearly present the problem First Nation students face in terms of educational attainment based on recent research presented at the Aboriginal Policy Research Conference. 2 To develop a review of relevant North American literature on dialogues and studies of performance-based assessment and standards-based reform of Aboriginal education. 3 To present a proposal that moves Canada closer to a full performance-based assessment of nationally recognized and culturally sensitive content standards as a basis for funding the growth of educational achievement. This will include a rationale for transferring funds to First Nations’ communities, based on the number of students who train for and take provincial standardized tests. A

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