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

Thanks Loudmouth Joe and your wife.
Well not suburban but rural these days but far too many are not getting to school.
for me at least your comments are very real.
I always will want everyone to get an education,and much of it the same as every ones.
I know an ex racist,white not a bad bloke, but life is strange he works now in education.
The very kids we speak of, the hard ones.
I have seen this bloke cry, often,as his task gets harder.
He once was as described so yes hope springs internal.

Loudmouth what makes me sad is if your thread had been about bl*&*ing the dole it would be 100 posts long by now.
I see in your post understanding.
It says exactly what I think is needed,that education should focus first on the normal for all.
I know,as it always has been,those you speak of will be the leaders in the next generation.
And as we differ on left right wing issues,could ask for nothing more than every one being educated.
It is my view,we are guilty too,in leaving kids behind, by being too lax, not make sure education is taken by all.

Not to worry, Belly - every year that goes by, Indigenous people are more successful in tertiary education, with more students, more graduates, and more people with a wider and wider range of expertise, working in the Australian community generally, and in the Indigenous community more specifically.

Think of it this way:

* yes, about 20 % of the population ('unemployed adults not in education') is seemingly stuck in lifelong welfare-dependence, but the rest of the population is either in education (30 % of the population is school-age children [180,000], after all, and another 12 % are adults who are either at university [12,000] or in TAFE/VET courses [70,000]) or working (35 %, [200,000].

* since the seventies, the Indigenous population has rapidly differentiated into two main populations - one on welfare, the other in education or work. Really, what we are looking at is the phenomenally rapid development of a class structure, with some at one end up, up and away and an unskilled and unmotivated minority still waiting for permanent welfare like dung beetles at the @rse-end of the last Diprotodon.

* unless steps are taken to 'encourage' the welfare-oriented population to get into education and/or employment, the rest will race away from them - some of the professional, to be sure, will live off the permanently-unemployed but I fervently hope that a growing proportion of highly qualified people will seek employment in the mainstream and buildtheir lives and careers alongside other Australians, as self-determining individuals.

* clearly, apart for extremely few exceptions, group self-determination, 'community' self-determination, has failed: nobody was ever really serious about it. I think that 'S-D' was merely a code for 'lifelong welfare', for a large chunk of the population, as recipients and as parasite professionals, people with some clout or influence who would cover for the recipients, who would perennially justify lifelong welfare because of what might have happened to people's great-grandmothers. According to the holy texts of oral history, which never lies or gets distorted.

Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, think of it again from another angle:

[TBC]

[contd.]

* each year now, about 12,000 Indigenous people turn twenty. The equivalent of nearly half start university each year (probably close to six thousand this year). The equivalent of the rest start TAFE/VET courses. In other words, by the time this age-group turns thirty, the great majority will have either gone to university and graduated, or finished a TAFE course. Or both.

* Indigenous people have opportunities. They have choices. They make their own choices, some sensible and some stupid, like other people. I'm confident that the sensible choices will prevail.

* by 2020 or soon after, Indigenous university graduates will number more than fifty thousand, one in seven adults - one in every four women in the cities. Some time in the 2030s, graduate numbers will hit 100,000, one in four or five adults. What impact will these tens of thousands of graduates have on their relations, their friends ? On Indigenous policy ?

* Meanwhile, what will be going on out in the remote settlements ? Anything positive at all ? I'm sceptical, to say the least.

Cheers,

Joe

I feel very good after that Joe.
Well put and in truth while reading it came to me that the faults can be found in every group white, refugees, any group.
What irks me is the PC leeches that ride on the backs,even seem to support and encourage failure, in those shanty towns.
regards

Joe,
I feel a bit more hopefull after reading your views.

What concerns me the most now is the fate of the children in remote areas. Do you have knowledge of the NT intervention and the outcomes?

I read the report that prompted the intervention and was appalled at the sexual and other abuse of children and the infection and parasitic infestations that the parents seemed to ignore. Not to mention the lack of education.

I would be interested in your views on whether there has been any progress here and your opinion as to what can be done. It seems most politicians put it in the 'too hard' basket.

Hi Banjo,

I don't know much more about the current progress of the Intervention in the NT than the average person. However, it appears that - to connect to your concern for children and their education - the Education department in the NT now has a much more rigorous Head, who is busy reforming many procedures within his department, appointing many dedicated teachers, mobilising community support for more rigorous and consistent school attendance, etc.

As well, Noel Pearson's initiative in Cape York seems to be bearing fruit, and education administrators across the north and in remote areas are watching critically.

Even so, how to bridge the gap between up-and-away Indigenous graduates and professionals in urban areas, and young people and children in remote settlements ? Yes, this is going to be a critical issue, even if Indigenous education hotshots aren't aware of it yet, and may not ever want to be. The winding-down of universities' support programs has, in that sense, been disastrous - highly competent staff 'let go' and sacrificed to the greater good of teaching garbled versions of 'Aboriginal Culture' to gullible (and no-so-gullible) non-Indigenous students at universitieas.

So, in order for universities to be of any use to Indigenous young people in remote settlements and rural areas, Indigenous student support has to be re-instated over the next ten years or so. As those kids struggle through primary and secondary school, in very difficult circumstances, universities' Indigenous liaison and support programs should be trying to work closely with remote schools and boarding schools to keep kids in touch with their options (tertiary or VET) and to keep encouraging them to work hard and achieve their best.

Indigenous student support programs across Australia made all the difference in those critical years of 1977 through to the nineties. They will have a more difficult and sustained role reaching out to those young people in remote and rural areas, for at least the next generation - longer, if they delay.

[TBC]

[contd.]

Otherwise, we will be having this anguished discussion again, about another Intervention, in another generation or so.

Lives are at stake here, so it's appalling that universities seem to have no answers.

Perhaps the newly appointed 'First Nations Education Advisory Group' might interrupt its incredibly-important Canberra meetings and overseas conference circuits, to pay some attention to these issues ?

Cheers,

Joe