Passing grades for failing our children

Forty-nine percent, not usually a number to extol as a record achievement. Someone should inform BC Minister of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development Moira Stilwell that a forty-nine percent graduation rate of our aboriginal students is not acceptable, particularly since this is being lauded as a record high completion rate. In our school system, forty-nine percent would receive an "F" grade. Why does Minister Stilwell believe that the forty-nine percent success rate would be anything other than a failure of her government to significantly improve the education system and its ability to help aboriginal students succeed.
Of course, a caveat must be added that the report considers completion to be the graduation of a student from high school within six years, which is still longer than should be necessary to graduate.
The reality here is that in the two years prior to this 'record high' of aboriginal scholastic achievement, the rates of completion were at forty-seven and forty-eight percent; this is hardly the big improvement that the BC Government would have you believe it is.
How can this government come to the people and express pride that for fifty-one percent of aboriginal students, high school will take more than six years to complete? What kind of reality do we live in, where such dismal numbers are considered good news?
All that we have here is another gross example of how far removed from society this Government is, and how unprepared the BC Liberals are to actually do something in the interests of the people they claim to represent in the Legislature.
The education system is supposed to be a right, to give youths the knowledge and tools needed to succeed in an increasingly knowledge based economy. Instead, its becoming a prison sentence, forcing aboriginal students to spend years longer to learn the same material of their peers, and it should not be accepted as pleasing information to anyone, least of all the Government, who has an opportunity to end this travesty.