Ideas@TheCentre
Moving targets are failing Indigenous students
Helen Hughes AO 1928 - 2013 |
30 April 2010
About 20,000 Indigenous students attend Indigenous schools (schools with more than 80% Indigenous students), mostly in remote areas. Of more than 9,000 Australian schools, the 150 worst performing ones are Indigenous schools. Their literacy and numeracy failure rates are commonly over 80%.
Another 40,000 Indigenous students live in capital cities and regional towns and attend mainstream schools. Even in these mainstream schools, Indigenous failure rates are often four times higher than for their non-Indigenous classmates.
The causes of failure include lower expectations of Indigenous students, welfare dependent families living in dysfunctional communities, and education providers diverting resources into trendy ‘silver bullet’ programs, hoping for a quick fix. Instead, resources should be put into more face-to-face teaching of literacy (including phonics) and numeracy by qualified teachers.
Existing welfare payments enable families to ‘opt out’ of the workforce, which sends a message that education is not important. Welfare needs to be restructured to include incentives for school attendance as well as getting a job.
The federal government’s target for fixing Indigenous education has slipped from 1997’s ‘fix all the problems by 2002’ to today’s ‘fix half the problem by 2018.’ This would still leave Northern Territory students with Year 9 failure rates 31% higher than their non-Indigenous classmates.
Even that outcome is better than the one proposed by the Australian Education Union (AEU), whose recent submission (authorised by Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos) to the government’s Indigenous Education Action Plan stated:
'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.'
The government’s targets are too low and too far away. The AEU’s targets show it has lost touch with the broader Australian community.
Emeritus Professor Hughes is a Senior Fellow of The Centre for Independent Studies. Mark Hughes is an independent researcher. Their report Indigenous Education 2010 was released this week by the CIS.
