Like It Or Not This Is The Hot Topic Of The Day And...

...the plight of seniors, hungry children, gangsta street crime, affordable housing, etc. will have to take a back seat for the next few days. Once the hullabaloo dies down the media will concentrate on important issues like When parking is as good as gold Website helps car lovers and big families looking for a place to put their cars.

Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Fixing native education — a huge, complicated first step

The hot buttonsIn which federal politicians grapple fearfully with aboriginal affairs and same-sex marriage, and ignore abortion.
The Ottawa Citizen‘s editorialists issue the standard call for action, not just talk, with respect to the Crown-First Nations Gathering in Ottawa. And they echo the fairly common notion that the first step in a long process of improving relations and conditions should be “closing the education gap between the performances of aboriginal and non-aboriginal children in Canada, something that is both achievable and measurable.” We agree. In many cases the monetary, physical and human resources devoted to aboriginal education are indefensibly meagre. But while it’s certainly “achievable,” improving educational achievement in remote, troubled communities with no history of it is also going to be incredibly hard work.
Ken Coates and Greg Poelzer, writing in the National Post, highlight some of the challenges: convincing “dedicated professionals [to] go north for prolonged periods of time”; developing “homegrown professionals (who are much more likely to stay)”; getting the community squarely behind the school; and the fact that many of “the most talented” people will always tend to leave. Challenges aside, however, they believe “the overwhelming media fixation with stories of tragedy belies the increasing number of success stories that are far less well known. Failure, like success, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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