Opinion & Commentary
Education fails indigenous kids
Australia has to improve its education constantly, performing better from year to year in international benchmarks, to support productivity growth and quality of life. In the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy tests and My School website, Education Minister Julia Gillard has not only provided parents with vital information about their children's schools but given Australia an invaluable evidence base for school improvement.
In general, Australian schools perform reasonably well. But indigenous education is failing dismally. NAPLAN tests and the My School website confirm years of reports of indigenous education failure: 40 per cent of Australia's 150,000 indigenous students - 60,000 - are not achieving minimum national standards.
The Australian Education Union's ban on administering the NAPLAN tests, due in two weeks, fits its horizon for ending these high indigenous failure rates. The union's submission, authorised by federal president Angelo Gavrielatos, to the government's draft Indigenous Education Action Plan considers that "the realistic timeframe that should be considered to achieve outcomes for indigenous people equal to the rest of the community is to focus on the outcomes that should be expected for the children to be born in 20 to 25 years from today". In other words, the union's timeframe to achieve the same pass rates for indigenous as for non-indigenous children is more than 30 years.
NAPLAN and My School show most of the 150 schools with the lowest NAPLAN results (out of a total of about 9500 schools) are remote and very remote schools attended mainly by indigenous students. There are few non-indigenous schools in this group of 150, and few indigenous schools outside it. Many of the indigenous schools are in the Northern Territory, with some in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Education departments now know which of their schools are not performing. Many students who graduate from these schools cannot read, write or count. In these schools, 70 per cent to 80 per cent of students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 fail to achieve minimum national standards. Indigenous year 9 students in many remote schools have literacy and numeracy equivalent to mainstream students in year 3. They are six years behind and never catch up. About 20,000 indigenous students attend these schools.
A second, much larger group of indigenous students failing to achieve national minimum standards - about 40,000 - attend mainstream schools. They have failure rates of about 25 per cent compared with non-indigenous student failure rates of 10 per cent. Many are from welfare-dependent Aboriginal communities in cities and regional towns.
A third, largest group of about 90,000 indigenous students meets national minimum standards as other Australian students do. They are mainly from working families. They attend mainstream government and non-government schools and many go on to TAFE and university. They prove failing to achieve the standard is not the result of ethnicity. The gap in achievement is between those students - indigenous and non-indigenous - who achieve minimum national standards and the indigenous students who do not.
NAPLAN and My School confirm indigenous schools are the source of the worst failure rates. Some - notably the 40 Northern Territory Homeland Learning Centres - lack basic facilities. The Homeland Learning Centres also lack something else found in mainstream Australian schools: qualified teachers. The Territory plans to persist with Homeland Learning Centres, merely increasing "the delivery of teaching services up to five or six hours per day in a virtual or face-to-face context to each site". Assistant teachers and senior students are expected to install and maintain "meshed networks" with interactive screens. "Up to" five or six hours of virtual education will not succeed in delivering literacy and numeracy to a mixed class of primary school children whose first language is not English.
The commonwealth's intervention, extended by Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, has raised parental responsibility and improved attendance. Welfare incentives, however, make it difficult for parents who want the best for their children to make the compromises necessary to send their children to school every day. Welfare payments can be picked up anywhere. In the absence of private homes, crowded public housing encourages mobility. It makes little difference where a family is squashed in with relatives. High mobility that leads to low school attendance is thus the direct result of the absence of private property rights and of existing welfare incentives.
Chris Sarra has identified low expectations of indigenous students by education departments, principals, teachers, parents and students themselves as key barriers. These lower expectations operate in mainstream as well as indigenous schools.
Gillard's national curriculum, to be implemented next year, is a chance for indigenous students to move from the dumbed down curriculums of indigenous schools. Its emphasis on literacy and numeracy is a step forward. The new curriculum, however, would have to be implemented rigorously in indigenous schools, otherwise the easy options of teaching to lower standards will creep back in.
Several independent schools and the academies being introduced on Cape York are leading the way back from "silver bullet" special literacy and numeracy programs that divert resources away from classroom teaching and mire teachers in bureaucracy. Emphasis on quality classroom teaching, attendance, discipline, and longer school days, weeks and years to enable students to catch up, are essential to ending high failure rates. Several indigenous communities that have been fighting to obtain decent education for their children are opting for independent schools. They are armed with NAPLAN evidence of poor government school results. They, too, want school choice so their children can get a decent education.
NAPLAN and My School have identified where Australian education is working and where it is in crisis. Kevin Rudd reiterated in February his government's commitment to "halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievement for indigenous children by 2018". But on present NAPLAN results, this would still leave indigenous children in the Territory with 35 per cent failure rates. Such targets are clearly not acceptable to indigenous parents. The Indigenous Education Action Plan, on which education ministers are working, will surely reject this outlook as well as the Australian Education Union's 35-year reform horizon. Practical proposals with the emphasis on the classroom teaching of the new curriculum to achieve mainstream results within five years are essential.
Helen Hughes is a senior fellow of The Centre for Independent Studies. Mark Hughes is an independent researcher. Their Indigenous Education 2010 paper was released by the CIS.
