After four years’ in-depth research, Helen and Mark Hughes have just released their analysis of Indigenous education in New South Wales for the CIS (available on: http://www.cis.org.au/images/stories/submissions/sub-nsw-govt-review-of-indigenous-education-290312-hh-mh.pdf. )

They found that:

* Indigeneity is not the reason for a significant minority of Indigenous students failing to achieve minimum national standards in literacy and numeracy. However, it is important ot note that, in NSW, the majority of indigenous students achieve national minimum standards in all domains and years.

* Remoteness is not the cause of failure, nor is school-size or language spoken at home.

* The principal determinant of indigenous student performance is the quality of classroom teaching and school ethos.

* Indigenous programs have been a costly failure because they target ‘Indigeneity’ rather than classroom and school: Since 2008, WA and Queensland have improved pass rates faster than NSW.

* Socio-economic characteristics - welfare dependence - contribute to learning failure, particularly when low SES students are clustered in one school, i.e. residentially segregated.

* Principals must be given more autonomy in choosing relevant and productive learning programs, and bear more responsibility for Indigenous success or failure.

They reiterate that

* ‘Indigeneity’ is not the cause of ‘Indigenous failure’ but an emphasis on this has led to a raft of counterproductive programs. Such programs are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.


When read in conjunction with today’s release of Schools data, these findings reinforce the suspicion that the long-term trend to provide ‘different’ education for indigenous students, even to the point of re-segregating them from other students, has been quite disastrous, even though it boosted the careers of many Indigenous education ‘experts’ .

Racist theories such as ‘Indigenous learning styles’, for example, have probably done great damage to the education fortunes of many Indigenous students, thanks to the ignorant but well-intentioned efforts of some teachers.

[TBC]

[contd.]

This provokes a simple question: at what schools do Indigenous students do well ? Answer: at schools with rigorous and non-discriminatory methodologies and standard curricula.

Compare Indigenous school performance with Indigenous university performance:

* now that the vast majority of Indigenous university students are able to enrol in mainstream courses, degree-level enrolments have been rising by nearly 10 % per annum. Once Indigenous students are released from the chains of ‘Indigeneity’, once they realise that they don’t have to enrol only in Indigenous-focussed courses just because they are Indigenous, then they are up and away.

And the same can happen for Primary and Secondary students, all over Australia.

It's ironic that, in 'remote' areas, where experimentation with Indigenous students has been most flagrant, grandparents often have better literacy and numeracy levels than their own children, and grandchildren. At some 'communities', young people have to take an old person into town with them to interpret what English-speakers are saying to them, and what signs mean. How many more generations should people have to tolerate this level of incapacity, thanks at least partly to 'different' education ?

I would never claim the understanding of you and your wife here Joe.
However am interested in your view why the total failures, not as many as some think, but a seeming unwillingness .
Some parents and kids have to go to school.

Loudmouth you are right on the money.

Of course we must look at our delivery of schooling in different parts of the country but bs about "learning styles" needs to be dropped. There is absolutely no proof that applying Howard Gardiner's multiple intelligences ideas to mainstream schooling bears results. It was conceived to be applied where disabled people were unable to succeed in orthodox ways.

Indigenous students are not disabled, yet we teach them and assess them as if they are, not in a mainstream way.

This warm, fuzzy clap-trap is holding students back across the nation. In a perverse way this is good for indigenous students as educational apartheid is not setting them back comparatively as much as it would if it were otherwise.

Here is a good critique of learning styles. See the presenter's other videos on similar matters:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk&feature=channel

Thanks Belly,

Maria and I were focussed on community self-determination (particularly economic self-sufficiency and prosperity) for more than thirty years until it became clear - at least in the few 'communities' that we were familiar with - that the people themselves weren't interested in it.

For thirty-odd years, we thought of post-secondary, especially university, education as a key to providing the skills that communities might need to be completely self-running, including all management, finance and clerical positions, and of course whatever relevant productive skills might be of value. The goal of S-D seemed to always be receding into the future, and seemed to need ever-more requisite skills, but we thought that teachers especially would play a special role in boosting community coherence and capacity.

But in the communities we knew much about, none of that worked and they seem to be in the process of abandonment. And since the great majority of Indigenous people now live in urban areas, with urban population growth rising at three and four times the rate of rural and remote population growth, it now seems that urban society has far more to offer Indigenous people, now and into the future.

Nicolas Rothwell had a fascinating article in Saturday's Australia - 'A township reborn under a spreading tree' - which described changes at Wadeye in the NT over the last ten years or so, and the involvement of many of the older men and women in the daily running of the school (potential enrolment in the Wadeye school system is around a thousand kids). Rothwell always writes fascinating articles, of course, but this one is especially exciting.

Hope springs eternal, doesn't it, Belly ?

To answer your question as best I can from suburban Adelaide, with another one: why failure ? If one's family expects to stay in frugal comfort on welfare for life, what do you need education for ? If anything, the more educated, the more risk to one's 'helpless' status, and therefore the more risk to one's permanent need for welfare ? More later :)

Hi Luciferase,

Yes, the racist notion of 'Indigenous learning styles' has been especially insidious and destructive.

Certainly, there are social conventions of instruction, and most 'traditional', old-fashioned and out-moded systems of such social conventions usually emphasise rote learning, learning thoroughly what one is told and no more, the validation of a hierarchy in knowledge ownership, the importance of good behaviour and secrecy in who is taught, when, what by whom.

But such forms of instruction have little place in modern learning settings, including for Indigenous school-children.

What was especially racist about such ILS, which should have been obvious to any teacher with half a brain, was the attribution of different ways of learning for any child with any Indigenous background at all, a weird, perverted, 'one drop of Black blood' rule. How many teachers simply did not teach Indigenous students at all, on the grounds that they had not learnt how to deal with Indigenous 'difference' and their supposedly-different learning styles ? And that to teach them just like any other kid might do them, or their 'culture', damage ?

As you say, pure bs. But it's certainly helped many Indigenous academic careers along.

Cheers,

Joe