Opinion & Commentary
Hughes: Neither race nor distance
SOUTH Australia has relatively few indigenous students, but some of Australia's highest indigenous literacy and numeracy failure rates. The state's NAPLAN results show no progress among failing students in the past four years.
SA is definitely not on track to meet the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) target of "halving the literacy and numeracy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students by 2018". After a bad start to NAPLAN in 2008 when SA schools failed to report absent students, there have been high rates of absenteeism, with literacy and numeracy results fluctuating more than in other states.
Although they comprise a minority of SA students, a larger group of indigenous students are consistently failing NAPLAN.
Only 70 per cent of SA indigenous students are achieving minimum national literacy and numeracy standards, compared with more than 80 per cent in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
Maria Lane is an Aboriginal woman from Point McLeay who started her working life as a domestic servant but became a senior lecturer at the University of South Australia.
She wrote of how men and women of her parents' and her own generation overcame obstacles to acquire skills and send their children to school - and then on to vocational courses and universities without "losing a sense of difference and pride in one's indigenous background".
She further notes: "Their ancestors will forever be indigenous, and their ancestral places will always be indigenous".
The children of working Aborigines are attending mainstream schools and achieving the same results as non-indigenous children.
Their participation in vocational education and training is higher than that of non-indigenous Australians and more than 600 are currently enrolled in SA universities.
The causes of high indigenous failure rates are not ethnicity or remoteness.
Indigenous students have the same intellectual capabilities as non-indigenous students and, likewise, non-indigenous schools in remote locations achieve high NAPLAN results.
The causes of high indigenous failure rates are in classrooms that do not deliver quality literacy and numeracy instruction.
Most of SA's failing indigenous students are enrolled in under-performing mainstream schools where they sit side-by-side with non-indigenous students also from low socio-economic backgrounds.
Schools in the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands are among the worst performing schools in Australia, with literacy and numeracy results at the bottom of Australia's more than 9000 schools. Low attendance rates follow low-quality instruction but are also influenced by the dysfunction of totally welfare-dependent communities.
The SA Government has a unique response to high absenteeism and the 100 per cent literacy and numeracy failure rates in these indigenous schools. Boys who stay away from school to roam the bush are deemed to be engaged in a new "discipline". For up to a term they are no longer marked as absent.
SA educators George and Robyn Hewitson won accolades for the indigenous school at Kalkaringi (formerly Wave Hill) in the Northern Territory in the 2000s with a mainstream curriculum, rigorous classroom instruction and high expectations of students' academic results.
Students did not just pass but were the first of any remote Northern Territory community to graduate from secondary school. Students qualified for, and have since graduated from, university.
The Queensland Department of Education has worked with Noel Pearson's Cape York Partnerships to transform notoriously failing indigenous schools in remote Cape York communities.
Queensland and Western Australia have improved indigenous literacy and numeracy since 2008 although they will still have to work hard to give indigenous students the same educational outcomes, and hence life choices, that other Australian students enjoy.
New South Wales has just embarked on an ambitious program that gives principals the power to transform underperforming schools with high concentrations of indigenous students.
SA is being left further behind despite its dedicated and experienced principals who have proved that they can turn around failing indigenous schools.
Sadly, it is the state's political commitment that is lacking.
Emeritus Professor Helen Hughes is a senior fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and Mark Hughes is an independent researcher.
