Building Bridges to Success for First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Students: Developing Policies for Voluntary, Confidential Aboriginal Student Self-Identification: Successful Practices for Ontario School Boards
This document provides guidance for educational organizations to create and implement systems that allow students to self-identify as Aboriginal people. The collected data can then be used for student services and to monitor student achievement. While many of the legal concerns would be different in the U.S. context, this document provides a baseline of steps any education organization should consider when creating a data collection system.
The content of this Ministry of Education (Ontario, Canada) document is quite good and has been effectively developed and produced. However, because of the document’s relative uniqueness to Ontario, Canada, its value and utility to U.S. school boards or states is likely limited, in particular because it was used primarily to identify previously unidentified First Peoples/native students in Ontario. Similar needs in the United States may be considerably less. The communications quality is excellent; the publication is effectively written and professionally designed. Evidence of effectiveness – in this case, reducing the number of unidentified Canadian First Peoples – is derived primarily from qualitative, rather than empirical, data. Tools and appendices are provided.