In the sci-fi classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox wears peril-sensitive sunglasses. These turn blackly opaque as soon as the wearer is in the presence of danger, on the time-honoured principle that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
It turns out the Department of Education operates on the same principle. Every time someone claims there is a problem with the graduation rate -- a dangerous topic; youth and the future of the Yukon are involved -- the Department’s statistics team activates senior management’s peril-sensitive sunglasses. All they can see is a set of carefully selected numbers showing everything is fine.
However, not everyone wears these glasses. This creates surreal scenes, much like in Hitchhiker’s, where the Department acts like everything is fine while everyone watches them in alarm.
I have seen this play out several times. First, when I was on a school council and the graduation rate statistics seemed incredible. And not in the colloquial sense where incredible means awesome. I also wrote about graduation rates in this column back in 2007, when the Yukoners not graduating this year were still in diapers. Since then there have been Auditor General reports and more on the topic.
The latest episode involves the new Yukon First Nation Education Directorate (YFNED). As reported in the News, their statisticians went through eight years of data on 3,900 students from 2015/16 to 2022/23. They calculate the graduation rate was 47 percent for indigenous students and 73 percent for non-indigenous students.
These numbers are appalling. We live in an era of unprecedented change, when education is critical to adapting and thriving to the modern world. Some people used to do fine without a high-school diploma. Back in the day, my mother’s Whitehorse High grad class had thirteen students. All but one of them were girls since most of the boys had dropped out to drive truck or work in the mines. But I wouldn’t recommend it these days.
Meanwhile, the Department uses a different methodology. It finds an indigenous graduation rate that is a dramatic 1.5 times higher than YNFED: 71 percent. Its figure for non-indigenous students is ten points higher at 83 percent.
The figures still aren’t great, but you can see why Zaphod Beeblebrox would prefer these numbers if he were Minister of Education and not just President of the Galaxy.
The Department’s method is to calculate the graduation rate only looking at students who were active Grade 12 students on track to graduate if they pass their classes. If you dropped out in Grade 9, and don’t graduate with your former classmates, you are not included in the statistics.
This would be like the Department of Transport only counting aviation accidents if they happened to planes that were already lined up for final approach to the airport. Were all the passengers killed when the plane crashed into a mountain, ran out of fuel over the ocean, or collided in mid-air while the pilot was texting? Not our problem. We have a 100 percent safe landing rate.
The Department’s communications response also gets an F. The Department said the reason it used its methodology was that it was consistent with BC, so numbers could be compared across jurisdictions. That comparison might occasionally be useful, but did Beeblebrox give BC a Kill-O-Zap Blaster that will fry the Yukon if we also publish a more useful statistic that sheds light on a profoundly important public issue?
When caught in such an obvious attempt to hide the facts from the public, the correct answer to YFNED is “You caught us; we’ll publish those figures too.”
But no. When they released their unfiltered numbers, the YFNED told the News that they have been raising this issue for some time. They said they had made “36 requests for specific information” since 2021, receiving the desired information zero times. Various statistical working groups have met fruitlessly over the last two years.
YFNED actually set up their own statistics team to try to get to the bottom of the situation.
This is amazing. The second sentence on the Department’s webpage says “We work closely with our partners in education, including Yukon First Nations, and school communities to develop and improve our programs and practices.” But instead of collaborating on basic facts, they have been stonewalling the territory’s First Nations education organization.
The taxpayer is now paying for two education statistics teams.
How do the Minister, Deputy Minister and Assistant Deputy Ministers go to meetings and press conferences and say the word “partnership” with a straight face?
But it gets worse! Go back to the Auditor General’s report on the Department of Education in 2009 and consider finding #31: “We noted that the graduation rates published in the Department’s Annual Report are expressed as percentages of the potential to graduate … making the rates published in the Department’s Annual Report misleading.”
The Yukon spends more per student than any province or territory except the NWT. Statistics Canada says expenditure from pre-primary through high school was $29,312 per student in 2020/21. That’s double the national average of $15,604 and more than $10,000 per student more than the next highest province at $17,697.
And for all that money, we get the results the Department tries so hard to hide.
We do have to acknowledge that it takes more than a Department to educate a child. Students must want to be educated. Parents must support and encourage. The community must value and celebrate education.
But the Department of Education should be leading on this front, not hiding in some science-fiction-esque accountability vortex. The Department could demonstrate this by putting its energy into partnering to solve the graduation problem instead of fudging the statistics.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
