It's pretty hard to disagree with this analysis. The broader and harder question is what to do about 'mainstream' schools that consistently achieve poor results. There appear to be three options: do nothing and argue that it's all the government's fault; intervene to close or reconstruct the school with accompanying increases in funding targetted to assisting the students most at risk; or close the school and send the students to a more successful school nearby.

International experience suggests there are no easy answers, especially given the utter intransigence of the teacher unions when it comes to poor performance.

Have you considered that if the government's not getting it right it might be the fault of the schools?

Farfromtheland,

There are similar schools in other states, perhaps in all states and territories. The oldest segregated school here in SA was opened in 1985, ostensibly (at least one objective) to improve the chances of Aboriginal students to go on to university or trades. I don't know that a single student has actually done so, while students from schools all across the northern suburbs have graduated kids and gone on to university and trades.

If anything - and I could be dreadfully wrong - regardless of the school, the teachers, funding, whatever, it seems that students at such schools have often had trouble in 'normal' schools and are parked at such segregated institutions, where it doesn't matter so much if they throw chairs around the room, and from which they do not actually get anywhere, because the purpose is to keep kids at school, off the streets and out of trouble as long as possible, regardless of whatever the kids may achieve at school.

Once they have completed their years of schooling, then they are no longer the problem of the Education Department, but - sooner or later - of Police and Correctional Services. Problem solved !

Meanwhile, more than two hundred Aboriginal people commence university courses in South Australia each year. Close to two thousand have graduated - the vast najority since these schools were set up.

The road not taken .......

Please forgive me for seeming flippant - I was answering the comment rather than the original article...

'Indigenous students are not the only ones for whom schooling must overcome socio-economic disadvantages if equality of opportunity is to be more than a slogan.'

I am deeply opposed to segregational schooling. I do believe that all state education suffers, sometimes inadvertently, from political manipulation. I have taught in a 'failing' London school with a high proportion of refugee pupils - it was the only local school where they were offered a place. There is less overt discrimination in the system here but more or less blatant economic discrimination by house prices in the areas of popular schools. The culture here too is to keep potentially troublesome kids off the streets and out of the statistics, rather than to provide a rounded education.

The 'trouble' with such education is that it empowers people to become more successful critics of the system. We are plagued with a generation of politicians who rose to power during the post war progressive boom, with much better educational opportunities available, which they now seem happy to sacrifice for future generations under a spurious target culture. This was the cycle I was trying to point at.