As this is but one aspect of "indigenous" disadvantage,after more than 200 years of failed policies, why cant the obvious conclusion be drawn: abandon all forms of discrimination and let "aborigines" become Australians.Leslie

Leslie, the Aboriginal leaders don't want that. They want a separate Aboriginal society. I gather from the Aboriginal gent who spoke to the National Press Club yesterday, that they also want to be self funded in due course. There probably are enough so called Aboriginal people out there today to accomplish this, but I suspect that most of them are quite happy just being Australians, having thrown off the yoke of being an Aboriginal the day they graduated.

David

Oh no, not another jaundiced and misleading article from the Queen of Spleen, flogging one of her pet obsessions: that there are simple answers to Aboriginal predicaments, and only she is capable of enunciating them. Helen knows full well that when "Departments of Education blame high failure rates on 'Indigeneity'", this is code for the prevalent circumstances of local Indigenous family life in most remote communities. It is not a reference to the potential capacity of the people concerned.
When she claims that "Indigenous students have the same distribution of intellectual capabilities as non-Indigenous students" she is being disingenuous.
There is a wealth of published evidence showing a very large majority of these remote Aboriginal community children are raised in extreme poverty, often experiencing degrees of FASD, malnutrition and trauma prior to birth, and encountering violence, desertion or severe inattention, emotional neglect, nutritional carelessness, and lack of continuity with good close care by a significant other in the first months, develop very differently on average.
Their brain and emotional development is heavily impacted, and often their physical and intellectual development is very badly affected. On the other hand, the circumstances of local Indigenous family life in most parts of these states cited by Hughes (in parts of Qld, NSW, Victoria and the ACT, where Indigenous students are performing at a better level) are very different. There is usually much better health, housing, intergenerational educational and employment achievements, much more inter-marriage with outside groups, etc.
The Hughes duo are being typically tricky and obtuse, holding stubbornly to a gross oversimplification of the problems, and positioning themselves on a self-defined and self-serving moral high ground based on arrogance and contrariness. A lot of the their exposition is really dishonest.
For example, their statement that "some 20,000 Indigenous students attend so-called 'Indigenous schools' located in bush communities on Indigenous lands" in which allegedly "classes [are] often left to untrained Indigenous Assistant Teachers who could not pass Year 3 NAPLAN tests" is simply not true.
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Apart from the fact that Indigenous Assistant Teachers are not totally untrained, or generally unable to pass year 3 NAPLAN tests, only a very small proportion of these 20,000 students are ever left in such a situation.
As for the accusation that "more than 40 Homeland Learning Centres in the Northern Territory, some in derelict shacks, still do not have qualified teachers for every day of the week": although this is basically true, much of the time there are no students at many of these schools, and the schools in question have less than 300 enrolled students between them, forming a very small proportion of the 20,000 students being discussed, although there would be no way that this could be guessed from the Hughes twins' article unless you had inside knowledge of the situation.
NB most of these remote Indigenous schools are very different to the small isolated homeland school where the Hughes carried out their research in East Arnhem Land .

"There is a wealth of published evidence showing a very large majority of these remote Aboriginal community children are raised in extreme poverty, often experiencing degrees of FASD, malnutrition and trauma prior to birth, and encountering violence, desertion or severe inattention, emotional neglect, nutritional carelessness, and lack of continuity with good close care by a significant other in the first months, develop very differently on average."
So bring them into mainstream Australia. Leslie

Leslie
Isn't that what good education should help to do? You can't just take kids wholus-bolus from their families and homes and wave a magic mainstream wand to make it all work. There are the small matters of law, parental rights, natural justice, lack of appropriate services, and absence of a qualified workforce that is available and willing to provide various services which are obviously needed to support the changes that are required, regardless of where the children are living. It's just not simple or easy.