Thank you, colleagues, and thank you, Mr. Speaker. WHEREAS, the Education Renewal Initiative represents sweeping and significant change to the delivery of kindergarten to Grade 12 education in the Northwest Territories;
AND WHEREAS testing shows that more than 25 percent of NWT students are not at the academic level they need to be for their age;
AND WHEREAS the Grade 12 graduation rate for the NWT is 52 percent and may be declining;
AND WHEREAS many students emerge from NWT schools without the tools they need to succeed in life, and without sufficient knowledge of the core curriculum;
AND WHEREAS an increased focus on early childhood development is known to improve learning performance throughout a person’s life;
AND WHEREAS many of our youngest students enter school without development of the communication and learning skills needed to succeed in school;
AND WHEREAS more than 35 percent of NWT children in kindergarten are significantly behind in their development (including as many as 60 percent of five-year olds in some communities), as measured by the Early Childhood Instrument;
AND WHEREAS changes to the education system will have a substantial impact on students, parents, teachers and administrators;
AND WHEREAS public and community involvement are critically important to the success of the Education Renewal Initiative;
AND WHEREAS in considering the areas of the NWT school system requiring improvement, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment consulted widely with its partners in education, carrying out 30 “engagements;”
NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, that this Legislative Assembly recommends that the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment (ECE) set and publish concrete targets for early childhood and student achievement within a prescribed time frame, and describe actions to be taken to achieve the targets;
AND FURTHER, that ECE and the Department of Health and Social Services substantially increase and improve community-based, GNWT-supported early childhood development programs and resources to support them;
AND FURTHER, that ECE now involve more communities, parents and teachers in implementing education renewal, and to promote greater understanding of this initiative;
AND FURTHERMORE, that the Government of the Northwest Territories provide a comprehensive response to this motion within 120 days.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. To the motion. Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. You saw Members of this side of the House rise one by one yesterday to express their deep concern about this Education Renewal Initiative put forth by our government. Throughout the day it became clear that it was a government initiative with consulting their partners, but it’s not the people’s initiative. That’s what I heard when I did my tour in the fall time, is that people were excited, they want to be involved in the education renewal. They pointed out to me clearly some of the shortcomings that I wasn’t able to get a good answer on yesterday. Some of the shortcomings are: top students in my small schools are failing Alberta standards; top students once again are shown time and time again that what they are being taught is not what they are expected to learn, and I don’t see that in the Education Renewal Initiative at all.
I’m urging the motion partly speaks to getting back out there to the small communities, to all the communities, to speak with the teachers, the students, the educators and the parents and get everybody involved in forming a truly Education Renewal Initiative.
Time after time in past Assemblies, we talked about changing the education system, but we want real changes and we want real results. We’re talking about devolution. We passed three or four pieces of legislation that’s going to make us our own power in this great Northwest Territories. I was talking about resources of land and water, subsurface rights, but the most important resources are people, the students and the people here. We have to educate them. We have to have the base. We have to have them well educated enough so that we can take over our own land into the future and that’s really important. It is not important for the Department of Education to roll out stuff and say this is how we’re doing it. It is more important for them to hear and roll it back and make those changes that people want.
I see a future where our children are not some poor statistics that show that we’re not learning, we are not graduating, we’re not graduating enough. We must set a standard. We must set a goal. The motion speaks about it. What is the department’s goal? One of the goals ought to be that we will never fail these achievement tests, that we will have graduates that can go to Alberta, that can go to B.C. or other institutions and not have to retake subjects or else, worse yet, have the shame of not even knowing what’s happening down there and coming home by Christmastime.
I have often said in this House we track our students right up to Grade 12, but we don’t track those that do not succeed in southern institutions and they come home. It’s disempowering when we tell them that they’re passing, we tell them that they’ve graduated, but yet they cannot succeed down south when they go to higher institutions of learning time after time. Here we have an opportunity with the Education Renewal Initiative to say, let’s do this right. We have to create a future, and our future is our children, and involving everybody and building a truly Educational Renewal Initiative. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
To the motion. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m very happy to rise and support this motion. As people probably know, I have a bit of a passion for education. The intent of this Education Renewal Initiative is to use the most current educational research finding and promising practices of the 21st Century. That’s the intent. I’m not sure we’re getting there, but we will.
Education systems are very complex and changing them requires multiple concurrent initiatives. It requires motivation and collaborations if we are to make the change successful. Given the additional layers of complexities in the NWT, it’s even more important to ensure that we get the process right at the beginning, that we ensure that all the necessary partners are at the table, to make sure that NWT students are given the best opportunities for success, that the final product is going to make a difference, that it will be welcomed by students, staff and community members, and it’s even more critical as we move from the framework that we have now seen tabled into the action plan which the Minister tells us is coming.
From my conversation with educators on the front line, so to speak, the teachers in the classrooms, the principals, board members and so on, I hear that they have not been rigorously consulted; never mind rigorously consulted, they haven’t even been consulted in the development of the framework. That must be changed as the department goes to producing this action plan. Every teacher, every parent, every school trustee must get a copy of the framework to provide input into the action plan as we go forward. Any education renewal should be ongoing, it should be local and it should be continuous.
Most education renewal across North America is based not only on research findings, but also rely on relations with university and experts in university, professors and experts in educational reform. I don’t know, but I would hope that the NWT has engaged educational research experts to provide guidance on this huge project, to take advantage of the experience and the knowledge of education experts that are out there. I hope that the department will continue to use experts for peer review through the development of an action plan and then the implementation of that action plan. It’s extremely important that we are working on a plan, but we are also getting it reviewed by people who do this work and to make sure that we’re going in the right direction. We often say we have to get it right and we have to get it right from the start. Well, this is a case where any action plan that we put forward for the next 10 years has to be right in year one, not right in year five.
We have some examples of connections that we already have with our experts. We have a relationship between the University of Saskatchewan and our NWT Teacher Education Program. Have we engaged the people at the U of S in this Education Renewal Initiative? I don’t know. I haven’t seen that in any of the literature that I’ve seen.
A question that I haven’t got an answer to, as well, is whether or not the ERI document was peer reviewed before it was tabled and/or made public.
I have some other concerns about the Education Renewal Initiative. Where did the education authorities fit in this process? How does ECE expect to address the responsibilities that fall directly under the education authorities? How will the department ensure the accountability of the education authorities? And we heard that question from the Auditor General’s report on education a couple of years ago.
There’s mention many times in the ERI document of training of teachers and educational staff. Will the financial resources be there for these ongoing training sessions? Will the teachers be given the time away from their regular classroom and other duties in order to take the training?
There are a number of items in the ERI document that can’t be measured. Community involvement is one. There’s a fairly large section on the commitment of the department to involve teachers in the community, to involve the community and the schools, but I don’t know how ECE expects to monitor that and how they expect to encourage that. It’s a very difficult thing to tell a community that this is what you have to do.
Junior kindergarten is a concern. You heard about that yesterday, and the motion states that we need to substantially increase and improve community-based, GNWT-supported early childhood development programs and resources to support them. I absolutely believe that and I do not believe that junior kindergarten is aptly named an Early Childhood Development program.
Attendance is not addressed in the ERI document. That’s a concern for me and it’s been identified as one of the major barriers to student success. That’s been acknowledged by the Education department itself and it’s been acknowledged certainly by Members on this side of the House. That needs to be addressed better in the ERI document as we go forward.
The timing of the implementation of this major change is a concern for me. From what I understand, the department is looking at implementing this change beginning in September of 2014 and that’s a really short time frame. We have a framework and this is the beginning of November, we have less than a year in which to develop an action plan, set all the parameters in place to put that action plan into place and I think it’s a very short time frame. It’s going to have a huge impact on teachers in our schools. If you consider that it’s September 2014, we’ve got new teachers potentially in some schools, it’s the beginning of a new year, which is always a very stressful time, we’re going to have new materials for them because there are plans to change curriculum quite a bit and there’s going to be additional reporting because that’s suggested in the ERI document.
Research suggests that the biggest, most consistent factor in student success is a good teacher and I have major concerns that teachers are going to be negatively impacted by the ERI document if we implement it in haste, if we implement it sooner than what it should be.
I am concerned that if we’re not careful, what started as a genuine effort to renew education in the NWT will instead result in increased teacher workloads and increased teacher stress as the teachers try to make up for the gap that’s been caused by the reduction in services and funding. We have to be careful that this Education Renewal Initiative does not end up putting the responsibility for implementation and success on the plates of school authorities and school staff.
The bottom line is that teacher stress and burnout not only affects the teacher, but it also inevitably affects the learning environment and interferes with educational goals. From that we get kids who can’t succeed.
So, Mr. Speaker, I am fully in support of this motion. I do believe that we need to have concrete targets as is itemized in the first operative clause. I do believe that we need to improve our community-based, GNWT-supported Early Childhood Development program. I do believe that we need to involve communities and parents and teachers more in the further development of this ERI and I do believe we need a response from the government in 120 days.
With that, I urge my colleagues to support the motion. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve looked high and low and spent decades trying to find different solutions that will move our educational systems forward. However, recently, over probably the last decade, we’ve found exciting and informative advances in our knowledge about brain development and the development of our capacity to learn and to be healthy throughout life.
This has been exciting and it is becoming known throughout society now. It goes far to explain our failures to date in achieving our education goals. I believe our Education department is well aware of this, as are all of my colleagues. We’ve chatted about this quite a bit.
What is the crux here? First, brain development during pregnancy and the first three years of life is the biggest opportunity to ensure we have full learning capacity and health. Second, the neural pathways developed during this period largely dictate the future of a lifetime of well-being of this person. Third, if it doesn’t happen during this period, it is very challenging and very expensive to play catch-up.
What are the implications? We need to put our money into early childhood development, supporting families, communities and community-based programs towards effective early childhood development. We should not continue to gnash our teeth and throw new money at our educational system until we have made clear and measurable progress at supporting our young children prior to their entry into the education system.
Few gains will be made despite our best efforts through the Education Renewal Initiative until this has been achieved. This should not stop us from pursuing the Education Renewal Initiative with existing resources to begin implementing our new knowledge about learning and teaching in today’s environment.
Finally, we should not be putting dollars into junior kindergarten, again, until we have a comprehensive program in every community for ages zero to three. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. To the motion. Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Member for the motion and the comments of those that have spoken to the motion. It is a very critical issue, it’s a big initiative and we’ve been listening carefully, there are notes being taken and we have an obligation to provide a response in 120 days. We want the same type of things for our children in the system. Now we’re debating the best way to get there.
So, I appreciate the comments and, as this is direction to Cabinet, we will be abstaining. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. To the motion. Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m rising here today and supporting the motion. I’d like to thank Mr. Menicoche for bringing it forward.
Again, I’m always disheartened when I hear the Cabinet will always abstain on something that they truly believe in and have actually worked on in this initiative, but that’s neither here nor there.
Yesterday when we talked about this in the House, I brought some very startling information, statistics. By the time a student gets to Grade 4, they’ve missed already half of a year of school, and by the time that same student reaches Grade 10, the average NWT student misses two years of schooling.
In the terms that we use out in the public, we call that truancy, or basically lack of attendance, and it’s really disheartening when you look at the areas and the whereas’s in this motion, when it says testing shows that more than 25 percent of our NWT students are not at the academic level they need to be for their age, and that by Grade 12, graduation rates are at 52 percent and they’re declining. As they say in the Wildlife Act that we just debated here a few days ago, you can’t measure what you can’t count. The same holds true with our kids. You can’t measure if they’re not in their seats.
Clearly, all of these initiatives boil down to making sure that, first and foremost, we’ve got to have these kids in their schools. They’ve got to start being in the classroom, and that’s not an easy task.
This Education Renewal and Innovation Initiative is definitely a step in the right direction, but quite frankly, when you look at the dialogue that we had, or at least I had with the Minister yesterday, it’s clear that parents, educators, elected officials, municipalities, I’m really doubting if these people were involved with the framework of action. Unless we involve the community in trying to find ways to get our students in the classroom, it doesn’t matter what initiative we put, it doesn’t matter what we spend. That money will be for naught.
It’s critical that we also include our elders. Again, good ideas were brought here to the table, and all we heard was, “well, we might look at it.” I think we’re beyond the “we might look at it” phase. We’re beyond the framework. We’ve got to start putting actions to this, and we’ve got to, again, make sure that we can get our students into their classrooms.
That also will take some initiative in terms of money, sometimes financial in nature, and with our budget system before us here coming up here in December, and we’ll be talking about our upcoming operational main estimates in February, I’m going to be truly looking for this government, this Cabinet to put serious hustle behind the muscle. I want to see what we’re doing for education. I want to make sure those dollars are being put aside for this initiative, because if they’re not, I can tell you that I’ll be asking the Department of Transportation to give me a couple kilometres, because when roads start trumping our kids, we have a problem.
I’ll be speaking in favour of this motion. I would like to thank the Members here for bringing it forward.
To the motion. Mr. Yakeleya.
I just want to thank the mover and the seconder on this motion here. We’re talking about education, which has been a long-standing issue in this government. This is not something new. Over the years, as an MLA, and as the Minister is well aware – this issue is not new to him – we’ve been talking about the quality of education for a long time. Whether it’s in Yellowknife or it’s in the small communities such as Colville Lake, we’ve been talking about the quality of our education and the quality of our certificates that we give our Grade 12 students, called diplomas.
When I read that we’re the lowest in Canada in regard to our schooling, our education quality, that is shocking. I want to say to the parents and to the Ministers, would we stand for this. Are we going to stand for this? I know parents in southern Canada would not stand for this. If you’re educated, you grew up in southern Canada, you would have a high quality of education. Parents would not stand for this. Why are we standing for this in the Northwest Territories? It’s not okay.
Parents down in the southern parts of Canada will say, what’s wrong with you guys. Why are you doing this to your children? Stand up, for Pete’s sake, and fight for them. We won’t stand for it in Ontario, B.C., Alberta. It’s ludicrous.
I think that’s a real challenge to us, because we’ve got some really smart kids in the North. Some of them are really good. They sacrifice, they do the work, and they make it through. They make it through to university or college. Good for them. Good for the parents. They sacrificed. They know. But our indicators and our records show that that does not happen, especially in the smaller communities where Mr. Dolynny has mentioned. It’s pathetic when you see students that are falling behind. It’s pathetic that we’re allowing this to happen. We as legislators, the ones who put their X beside us and said do something about this, that’s what our job is.
I think we’ve really got to rethink and reload. I mean, there were students around this table here that had gone into the old system, Grandin College, Grollier Hall, Akaitcho. I talked about that in my Member’s statement, that we’ve come out okay. We had to sacrifice, but we had to sacrifice to get a good education, so when we graduated, we knew that it was a good Grade 12 diploma, and you can take it to the bank and say cash this in because I have a career. I don’t have to go down to the loans and say I need another year; lend me some more so I can pay off my debt. We had good education but it was at a sacrifice. That’s what I’m talking about. We’ve got to emphasize that.
The young people, how is it that when you first take your children to school, they’re all excited? They want to learn. You know, kindergarten, Grade 1, 2, but over the years, somehow, they seem to regress, and after a while, in Grade 10 or 11, they’re like this and hard to talk to. They don’t really want to share. How is it that they move through that system? I don’t know. I mean, something happens. Where is that excited 6-year-old, 7-year-old, 8-year-old, all excited to learn, all that energy? Is it our system that dampens that spirit and soul, and that shuts down their individuality and creativity and spontaneity? And we’re just telling them they will acquire this information and gain this knowledge. I don’t know. There’s some real serious thinking here. How do we take care of this in our school system?
Three more points I want to touch on. This motion is about our system here and it’s about the relationship with families and involving the families into our school system. The real education begins at home, about values, belief and hard work and sacrifice. We cannot just send our kids and say to the teachers, take care of them for the next six hours. And by the way, little Johnny needs this, this and this, he doesn’t like this, he doesn’t want this. We have to be there with them. We have to be there with the teachers. They have enough on their hands to teach the children. We’ve got to build that relationship with the families.
We certainly learned a good lesson when the government implemented the residential school system, but we need to move from that and say that’s no longer there, and move to a new system of saying we want the families involved. How do we involve the families? There are ways.
My last two points, and again, one of the Members brought it up. It’s no different for us being legislators in this government here. If we’re not here, then we miss important information. It’s no different than attendance. You can have the best curriculum, but if you don’t have the student there, it doesn’t do us any good. It’s just like a sports team, I said at one time. If you’re not practicing with the team and you only want to come when the games are, it’s not good. You’re missing key pieces of the information to be a good player. Just like school. You’ve got to show up to grow up and to be there. That’s really, really key. That’s what we’ve got to stress, and that’s how we’ve got to work with the families.
My last point is that we need to do something new. It was done in the old TEST program in Inuvik with the skiing program. We have to look at something like that where it involves sports in school and it does wonders. We should have a TEST program in our school or one of our regions or something, so we can use sports as a means to put a group of students through a school system where they can excel at a national/international level. We had the first sisters, the Allens, the Lennies, the Cooks. We have all these great skiers. I say that we have wonderful athletes, also, so we could look at a TEST program that would help with our education.
I thank the mover and seconder for bringing this very important motion to the floor to have some discussion. I certainly look forward to working with the government on how to develop something within the next two years that could raise the numbers of our students in Canada and not be the lowest. It’s not good to be at the bottom. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion. Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I stand here today and I want to thank the mover and seconder for bringing this motion forward. Yesterday we had a strong discussion and strong information brought forward to this House, so the public could understand why we bring motions like this to the floor of the House.
The Education Renewal Initiative is going to be a 10-year plan, so this government has the responsibility and the decisions to put what goes into this plan, something that’s going to be concrete for our future leaders. As I mentioned earlier in my Member’s statement, we do have an organization down south that is doing great work for our youth and yet we are having a hard time providing the same type of quality service here in the North.
Over the next 10 years, all the information that’s going into this ERI document is going to be an investment. This government is going to have probably one of the greatest investments in our youth and the return on our investments is going to be priceless. We are going to have people that are educated, with quality education and quality educators that are going to contribute back to the society and that’s going to increase a sustainable economy here for the Northwest Territories.
In this motion it talks about community-based, GNWT-supported early childhood initiative programs and that’s where we have to start our investment. As I said yesterday, I have taken a strong interest in education, more into early childhood development being part of this Legislative Assembly and will continue to support throughout my term.
Like I said, I will be supporting this motion and thank all Members who have stood up and spoke in favour of early childhood development and making sure that this document that goes out to the community, that this document gets input from the communities, from the educators, from all those that are involved in education.
Like I said, I will be supporting this motion. I hope that this government does the right thing and that we have a strong investment in the future of our territory and the future of our leaders and our students. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. To the motion. Mr. Hawkins.
Mr. Speaker, certainly I will be supporting the motion. I was proud to be able to second this.
Quite often, we often think of education as such an amazing thing and here we have an educational renewal document that many educators are telling me that they’re concerned about the lack of input. If we want to do it right, we have to make sure we get off on a good foot. Any home builder will tell you that you can’t construct a good, sound, quality home without building a solid foundation. I consider this 10-year plan, this renewal, should be a solid foundation, one that is so firm and so strong it cannot be cracked or questioned. It should be the equality that we would be looking to our gold standard, so when we look to the foundation, is that quality there.
A number of educators have told many of us, some school boards have told us, consultation in some manner might have felt like they walked in one door and were in a hurry to get out the next. Where is the community consultation? We’ve heard from a number of people. I, like Mr. Yakeleya, know differently. When I dropped off my children at school, I looked in their eyes and thought of hope and promise. I look to the teachers. I give my children to the teachers and I look at why they do their job, because they’re deeply passionate about being involved with young minds, fostering opportunity, giving them hope for the future. I, similarly to Mr. Yakeleya, question where does that hope sometimes go with some of these students. That alone should be a call to arms.
One of the most significant problems we deal with here today, and I will lay two of them out, are certainly education and health. This happens to be one of the pillars of why many of us are here, which is education.
We must work with our educators to ensure that they get the best plan to help work with our children. We must be behind the educators to do this. The educators must be involved. The best gift I can give my children, besides health, obviously, is a good education. I question have we given them the best gift.
Fostering this opportunity must be a relentless challenge we continue to ask ourselves. We must find ways to help build those skills and certainly build those abilities within our young people and certainly give the right tools to every educator to be able to help build that future that is limitless for every young person. But often we hear comments in the sense of statistics, as highlighted by Member Dolynny, who is right. Kids aren’t going to school. That should be a question in and of itself. Kids aren’t finishing school with quality education. Where is the kicking and screaming? Kids that are graduating at the top of their class find that they’re at the bottom of the class elsewhere. They can’t even get into the class when they are actually tested. These are questions that need answering and I’m not sure that this education renewal is answering them in the way that needs to be done.
School boards want more, educators want more, MLAs want more, parents want more. We all want more out of this renewal program. I have yet to find someone who says this was the best we could have done.
I will be supporting this motion. I would say that, if it was my opinion, I think it needs to be reworked. I’m not suggesting those who didn’t do their job didn’t try; I just think we could do better. It’s not for me, it’s not for my colleagues, but for the kids that we want to give that limitless opportunity we call education to. Without that opportunity, we’re denying them their rights. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. To the motion. I will allow the mover to close debate. Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m very glad to hear the passion which a number of Members have been speaking about with the Education Renewal Initiative. I think it’s important, as well, to tell the teachers, the principals, the assistants out there, they are doing good at their front-line work, they are working hard, but we’re talking about a system here that hasn’t been working for a long time.
Our children are failing because we are failing, failing to ensure that they are the smartest and the brightest by having the best education system available. We’re failing to support them, that they will support us in the future.
The 17th Assembly is going to be well known because of devolution. It’s one of the legacy things that the 17th Assembly will leave behind, but I also want the 17th Assembly legacy to be about education renewal.
This will be a true legacy that this Legislature can leave behind. We simply must ensure our students are well educated for our future. We have to give them the drive and desire to learn. It’s not enough to have an education mission statement. We need leadership and desire to make this change. We have to give them dreams. Is it because we stop dreaming? We have to give them dreams about being firemen, RCMP, teachers, engineers, doctors, management and MLAs as well. But we have to have a dream so that they can have the dream. I think it is the dream of Members on this side today. Let’s have a true change to our education system by getting out there, hearing the teachers, the parents, the communities, and it’s about having the right resources. I think we spoke about the wrong programming. We have to have the right resources and give them the right programming. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The motion is in order. To the motion.
Question.
The motion is carried.
---Carried
Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I seek unanimous consent to deal with Motion 6-17(5) which I gave notice of yesterday.
---Unanimous consent granted
Mr. Dolynny, you may proceed.
