{"id":3439,"date":"2006-08-31T22:14:40","date_gmt":"2006-08-31T22:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/smoke-mirrors-language-and-indigenous-education\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","slug":"smoke-mirrors-language-and-indigenous-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/smoke-mirrors-language-and-indigenous-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Smoke, mirrors, language and Indigenous education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kirsten Storry’s paper on the problems with Aboriginal education<\/a> received a write-up<\/strike> was discussed by her in an opinion-piece in the Australian<\/em> 31 August 2006<\/a>. She is described as a ‘policy analyst’ for the Centre for Independent Studies. For her, problems with “literacy levels” equals problems with literacy in English – Indigenous languages are not on her radar. Hence the complexity of teaching second language students to read and write in a second language does not feature in her account. Remember when outsourcing was supposed to save government departments heaps of money, and also to improve efficiency of IT systems? Well, that’s Storry’s solution to Aboriginal education..<\/p>\n


\nStorry does one good thing – she points out that we need more reporting on what the figures on literacy levels in Aboriginal communities are, and on what does and doesn’t work in improving Aboriginal literacy levels in English. However, there are some alarming gaps in her report. She asserts that the Government schools have failed, but does not give the impression of having talked about this failure with teachers and educationists in the state school systems – many of whom have very interesting ideas about what needs to be done.
\nInstead, a large part of her solution assumes that, magically, private sector schools will be willing to take up the role of state schools, and will somehow succeed where the state schools have failed. How would the children be funded to attend these schools? Again, magically, charities and companies are supposed to sponsor kids. (There’s no comment on where the profits would come from to allow the private sector to run these schools, or on the moral issue of why the Government should be let off the hook of funding education in remote areas). Nor does she comment on the loss of the resources and knowledge that have been built up in a big education system such as the NT Education Department. She talks approvingly about volunteers and private sponsorship for creating books. But what about the excellent books that have been created in publicly funded Literature Production Centres in the NT?
\nHer solution of private sector involvement isn’t in itself innovative – Catholic Education has been involved for generations in providing education for Aborigines. The NT state secondary school Yirara College<\/a> was handed over to the Lutherans in 1993. Alice Springs has Yeperenye school, which is independent and closer to the charter schools she advocates. There’s been plenty of time to see if they are in fact doing significantly better than the state schools. Storry is silent about this. She gives no evidence as to why we might expect such private schools to succeed better than the present remote schools. And there’s no discussion of the experiment that has been tried in the NT state schools of giving school principals more autonomy, power and higher wages, which seems in line with what she proposes, but which, anecdotally, has led in some cases to a destructive turnover of programs, uncertainty in curriculum, and the loss of effective use of Indigenous languages in school, as each new Principal tries to differentiate him\/herself from his\/her predecessors.
\nSo, despite the air-time given to Storry’s report, there doesn’t seem to be much actual research involved – just a trawl through reports, newspapers and websites. She’s right that we need innovative approaches to teaching Indigenous kids to read and write. But we need evidence that the innovations are likely to work, before wasting yet another generation on yet another failed education attempt. Changes in policy need to be based on solid understanding of why students aren’t learning to read and write, not on the belief that privatisation is always better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kirsten Storry’s paper on the problems with Aboriginal education received a write-up was discussed by her in an opinion-piece in the Australian 31 August 2006. She is described as a ‘policy analyst’ for the Centre for Independent Studies. For her, problems with “literacy levels” equals problems with literacy in English – Indigenous languages are not … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indigenous-language-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4428,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions\/4428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}