Ideas@TheCentre
What this week’s NAPLAN tests mean for Indigenous Education
This week all Australian children in school years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sat numeracy and literacy tests for the second time. The tests are to give Australians an annual snapshot of basic educational progress. The first national ‘NAPLAN’ tests, held in May 2008, showed that 90% of children passed. Western Australia has made the tests available for government schools on the Internet and Ms Gillard has promised that all the 2009 test results will be posted by school.
An overview of the 2008 tests showed that there was no ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Indigenous students in mainstream schools in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT had the same results as non-Indigenous students. In Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland only half of indigenous students passed. The results were worst in the Northern Territory where only one quarter of Indigenous students passed the tests. On top of this 20% of all NT students failed to sit the tests because they were deemed unable to pass them. These figures mean that in some 200 remote ‘Aboriginal’ schools the failure rate for Indigenous students was 100%. These results are unsurprising when ‘Aboriginal’ schools have separate, dumbed-down curriculums which and are often taught by unqualified ‘Teaching Assistants’.
The Commonwealth Government has contributed an additional $100 million of funding for 2008-2011 to the Northern Territory alone. Yet the 2009 test results are not expected to show substantial improvement over last year because there has been no changes in remote schools to provide mainstream teaching that would enable children to make the same progress as other Australian children.
The Northern Territory has had a dilemma during the past week: if all students sat the tests, failure rates would increase; if a proportion of students were allowed to continue not to sit the tests, egregiously high not-sitting rates would expose the dire state of Indigenous education in the Northern Territory.
Professor Helen Hughes is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
