Develop – What Needs to be Improved?

Improving Success for First Nations Métis and Inuit Students Research

The background information describes many research reports, ministerial orders, strategic plans that have attempted to address the challenge of improving success for Indigenous students. Although, there has been slight improvement in traditional measures, such as the ones in the Alberta Assurance Measure Report , there has been little adoption of additional  measures of success as suggested in the CCL reports  Redefining How Success is Measured and The State of Aboriginal Learning in Canada: A Holistic Approach to Measuring Success.

Before one answers the question, what needs to be improved and how, there are several system leaders across Canada that have asked the same question and began to answer by gathering data, beyond assurance measures, that could help inform their decisions on the next steps.

One source of data that several school districts have examined is the streaming of Indigenous students into special education, academic programming, and discipline processes such as suspensions and expulsions. These school districts learned that there was an over-representation of Indigenous students in these areas and an under-representation in others such as gifted programming. These findings caused the school district’s leadership team to examine their policies and practices to support their staff to reflect on bias in their actions and decisions. As a result of studying the data, identifying trends, providing professional learning to staff on anti-Indigenous bias ,discrimination, and racism these actions resulted in a reasonable decline in the streaming of Indigenous students in these areas.

The Toronto District School Board Caring and Safe Schools Report 2018-2019 outlines their study into the data of the streaming of Indigenous and other students and actions they implemented and monitored to create a more positive, caring, and safe learning environment for all students.

Winnipeg Indigenous Executive Circle -State of Equity in Education Report highlights another source of data, the under-representation of Indigenous educators and trustees as part of the decision-making process to improve success for Indigenous students within school districts.

The under-representation of Indigenous educators has also been identified as a challenge in Alberta in the ATA-CASS report on Indigenous Teachers and Leaders in Alberta’s Public School System. Increasing the representation of Indigenous teachers and leaders in the public school system has been identified in these studies as a benefit to all students, staff and community.