Four weeks after the federal Education Minister declared that the latest Indigenous education results were a “hit in the guts”, we are still none the wiser about what her pledge to spend $2.3 billion under “new arrangements” to combat Indigenous illiteracy and truancy might actually mean.
On 29 December 2008, at the close of another year of poorly implemented schooling across the country, what was the newly resolved Minister offering that differed from previous table-thumping efforts following rediscovery of poor outcomes among Indigenous students?
Follow closely: The money is available to educators to use flexibly, but schools will be held accountable. Data will be collected. There will be no more pilot programs coming and going without long-term reform. It will be evidence based. Red tape will be slashed. No one is underestimating the need for resources, determination, resolve, high expectations and high standards.
But wait. The money is not exactly new, but represents money that has already been allocated via state-federal education agreements. This standard, perhaps CPI-adjusted budget allocation, will be supplemented by various amounts of actual new money dedicated not to Indigenous students as such, but to education for generic literacy and numeracy programs, disadvantaged schools, computers in schools, teacher quality programs, and the like, of which a proportion will naturally incorporate indigenous students.
And despite the disavowal of pilots (which seems to contradict the commitment to evidenced based decision making, being an essential methodological step in the sequence of testing claims for effect), truancy interventions targeting welfare-dependent parents will be conducted in a limited number of communities “to see how the program works”. Hmm.
The point is not that the announcements are full of contradiction, but rather that the lack of specificity and deceptive ability to appear as if new moneys really are being extraordinarily committed to an extraordinary national problem has attracted no critical comment at all. The announcement date may be part of the explanation: two days before New Year’s Eve does not guarantee an alert populace.
But behind the inarguable statements, surely some detail about what is being proposed, what evidence is to be called upon, how (beyond standardised data reporting) any of it will be scientifically measured, should be expected? It is an opaque policy agenda, one which could represent any service delivery portfolio, given the generic statements in play.
Does it matter? Well yes. Education results for Indigenous youth truly are appalling, and the lifelong consequences are devastating. The report that hit the Minister in her intestines shows that about 30% of Indigenous children across Australia fail basic tests in spelling, writing, reading, grammar and mathematics (against the Australian average of 10%); while in the Northern Territory, over 70% indigenous children in remote communities fail.
Responding to these longstanding challenges in the recent context of mad interferences and moral panics in the Indigenous domain is more difficult than ever.
Absolutely, education needs to be evidence based. Much of what takes place now is nothing other than antiquated habit and proceduralism, with the system reproducing itself year in, year out, cloaked with this year’s latest rhetoric about reform and urgency.
The very phrase “closing the gap” suggests the science of dentistry, not the science of sustained instructional improvement in classrooms with failed and failing students.
Such a science requires access to quality research expertise and tested ideas for gearing schools to accomplish the systemic reform that is being asked of them. That means having an idea of what the steps involved in generating evidence are and resourcing the substantive research and follow through thus entailed. Well designed pilots (not scattergun implementation efforts misnamed as pilots) are part of the pursuit.
A focus on actions at the unit of teachers and students will fail if contextual issues are ignored or left to the unlikely chance of having a good local problem solver at the school level, working in harmony with an intelligent and enabling policy support environment.
Reforms to improve the capacity of individual teachers to transform learning outcomes must also attend to the capacity of schools and the quality of the support systems available to schools within regional and central office administrations. This architecture of service delivery (encompassing the all-important responsibilities of workforce development, instructional expertise, teacher attendance and retention) cannot be left to vague assurances about leaving it to schools whilst holding them to account.
I am happy to be told that I am missing some key details. That would be the point.
Anthropologist Tess Lea is the Director of the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University. Author of a recent book on the culture of public health, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in northern Australia (2008 UNSW Press), in 2006 she toured the United States and Canada under a Churchill Fellowship tracking down evidence on effective education solutions for disadvantaged students.
Her interest in Indigenous education was first provoked a decade ago when, with the late Bob Collins, she undertook the first independent evaluation of Indigenous education conducted in the Northern Territory (Learning Lessons: an Independent Review of Indigenous Education).
As a long time white resident of Yuendumu, I despair at the flurry of racist and ignorant (often misspelt) comments pervading the media. The gratuitous attack on Mick Dodson for having said something he didn’t actually say was particularly savage. I am therefore reluctant to take issue with RJG’s letter, which was overall sensible and sympathetic.
1) “How does the indigenous population want to live?”-
How does the non-indigenous population want to live?
One size fits all assumptions and policies won’t work.
2) “The indigenous population before white settlement had no written language and not mathematics”
This is a furphy, widespread numeracy and literacy in western society has only been around a few
hundred years.
3) “Assuming that indiginous people WANT to write and use maths seems to me to be making the
assumption that they want to be integrated with the eventual dissaperance of their culture”
I know quite a few people at Yuendumu that want their children to become literate and numerate
AND maintain their Warlpiri language and culture.
What is the appropriate date to celebrate Australia Day, and how best to “close the gap”, and how can we force indigenous children to go to school continues to dominate the “conversation”, whilst we on “Prescribed” areas have had the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and the NT Anti-Discrimination Act suspended and our ‘two way’ bilingual school program is being replaced with compulsory English only lessons.
I reckon April 1st.!
Frank, I may not have expressed myself as well as I could. I agree with you that it is ONLY in the past 100 years and in some cases less, that the three R’s have been widely available to the European societies In my very limited experience of indigenous people I found they all wished to learn these fundamentals of european civilisation. Of course these things are needed for basic survival these days, particularly when dealing with smart lawyers, labour or otherwise. What really upsets me though is the notion that for indigenous people to be the equal of Europeans and to flourish in modern Australia they have to do what Europeans do. They are equal now. Gillard is really just pandering to the ignorant middle class who measure everything by their own narrow standards. A woman of her position, education and profession should know better. Talk about Howard and the dog whistle. He must have left it behind for the new Government.
The very phrase “closing the gap” suggests the science of dentistry…. indeed it does.
When the phrase first received wide publicity, some Yuendumu residents thought Kevin Rudd was referring to that prominent Alice Springs geographical feature: “The Gap”, and puzzled as to why the Government wanted to close it.
Thank you Tess for rightfully bringing this morass of policy and program ennui to our attention. I admit a wry bemusement at the Labor government’s shared proclivity for dentistry with the former government – over and above a bill of rights no less (see Gillard’s comments in the link at ‘offering’ ). A BoR promises to address the structural disadvantage of Aboriginal people caught in the nexus of oppression between states/territory and Commonwealth responsibilities for providing essential services (such as education) by eshrining the principle of equality for all peoples in the constitution. This would galvanise policy and program directions, proving to be immensely useful! Surely a lawyer such as Ms Gillard might recognise the fundamental legislative imperatives to address largescale disadvantage and bring about social justice…..(sigh!).
Closing the gap is a very interesting turn of phrase in the context of indigenous education. Designing an effective education system that meets the needs of the indigenous population is an essential task and it will not be an easy one. Before the design and execution of such a system can be expedited a far more important issue needs to be sorted out. How does the indigenous population want to live? What do they want to do? The indigenous population before white settlement had no written language and not mathematics and they survived that way for much longer than those culture like ours that do. Assuming that indiginous people WANT to write and use maths seems to me to be making the assumption that they want to be integrated with the eventual dissaperance of their culture. This is of course taking a rather extreme view. It is much less black and white than that. It is very likely that middle ground can be found. But no education system will work unless this key issue is faced up to. There needs to be robust and effective dialog “conversation” about this. The barrier to education for any person is its relevance to society in which they live and their value systems. How many anglo saxon teens find their schooling boring, but after a few years at work they realise that some of it was worthwhile, but much of it was not. It’s no different for an indigenous teen and in a situation of cultural ambiguity is is very much harder to bear.