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Article Excerpt
Indigenous education in Australia has been the subject of ongoing policy focus and repeated official inquiry as the nation grapples with trying to achieve equity for these students. Perspectives from recent developments in the USA and Canada highlight the similarity of challenges. The article employs a multidisciplinary approach to social theory to examine the underlying causes of the creation of a plateau effect of progress in this area. The article argues that the lack of progress is a reflection of a complex set of underlying factors, many of which are under acknowledged in educational debates. Arising from this examination is the need for a new governance model for Indigenous education involving both horizontal and vertical policy-making structures.
Keywords
Aboriginal education policy formation Aboriginal students Aboriginal history policy analysis race
Introduction
Australia 'discovered' the problem of profound educational disadvantage among its Indigenous people in the late 1960s. The disadvantage was evident in the high rates of educational failure among the first generation of Indigenous students to attend state schools, after generations of government policies aimed variously at their segregation and marginalisation.
Since the late 1960s, official concern at the continuing poor outcomes for Indigenous students has seen a wave of government-appointed inquiries into the failures of the education system to generate improved outcomes. In the 2005 commissioned government report, Overcoming Indigenous disadvantage, the Chair observed:
It is distressingly apparent that many years of policy effort have not delivered desired outcomes; indeed in some important respects the circumstances of Indigenous people appear to have deteriorated or regressed. Worse than that, outcomes in the strategic areas identified as critical to overcoming disadvantage in the long term remain well short of what is needed (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, 2005, p. 19).
As the quote testifies--confirmed in a raft of official and academic studies--the experience of educational reform for Australia's Indigenous students has been one largely, although not exclusively, of failure. The benchmark for this under performance is the 1989 Commonwealth-State National Aboriginal Education Policy (the first of its kind), which set a target of the year 2000 for achieving equity. While steady, but slow, improvements have been made since the inception of the policy, the goal of equity in outcomes remains a distant one. In light of these difficulties, two key questions inform this article: Why has only slow progress been achieved? Why does this progress appear to have created a plateau effect?
To examine these questions, we conceptualise and theorise the nature of change in Indigenous education by applying social theory to illuminate the complex interactions between Indigenous people and the broader Australian society within which the dynamics of educational disadvantage operate. We employ a multidisciplinary approach to social theory, drawing upon perspectives from history, education, public policy and public administration in our attempt to fully grasp the complexity of the reasons behind the current slow rates of progress. We also hypothesise possible paths to achieving more rapid progress to equity. (This article builds upon earlier research: see Beresford, 2003; Beresford & Gray, 2006.)
Australia's Indigenous population
Australia's current Indigenous population is approximately 400 000 people, or 2 per cent of the population, of whom 70 per cent are under 25 years of age (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005). Indigenous people live in a variety of settings including major urban locations (around 30 per cent), in rural towns with fewer than 10 000 inhabitants (42 per cent) and 28 per cent in remote areas. Diversity is further underpinned by the degree of dispossession from land and the impact of successive government policies since white 'settlement' in 1788. One of the implications of this diversity for education is the inapplicability of universal solutions or programs.
While there is evidence of a growing middle class among urban Indigenous people, socio-economic disadvantage continues to characterise a large number of Indigenous people, including high rates of unemployment, mortality and morbidity, overcrowding and imprisonment. This is particularly evident in rural and remote locations and in any urban and peri-urban settings where very high levels of disadvantage are common. Some relevant socio-economic data include the following (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, 2005):
* Life expectancy in the Indigenous population is 17.2 years less than the total Australian population.
* The age-standardised unemployment rate was 3.2 per cent higher for Indigenous than for non-Indigenous people.
* Mean gross weekly household income was at least $200 less for Indigenous than for non-Indigenous people.
* The proportion of Indigenous people living in homes that someone in their household owned or was purchasing was 27 per cent compared to 74 per cent for non-Indigenous people.
* Suicide rates are much higher for Indigenous people (between 12 and 36 deaths per 100 000 people) than other people (between 11 and 16 deaths per 100 000 people).
In fact, one study suggests that by comparison to Indigenous people in the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Australia's Indigenous population has the worst overall rates of socio-economic disadvantage (Kaufman, 2003).
Current educational outcomes for Australian Indigenous youth
Progress in educational outcomes reported in a 2005 government report (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, 2005) shows mixed success over the last decade: some slow improvement coupled with disturbing contraction of key outcomes. For example, it was reported that in the last decade there was improvement in these areas:
* the proportion of Indigenous children commencing Year 1
* Year 3 reading and writing benchmark data
* participation in post-secondary education participation and achievement
* the proportion of Indigenous adults attaining post-secondary vocational education certificates.
Despite these improvements, the disparity between equivalent outcomes for non-Indigenous students remains stark. In fact, rather than the exponential growth in engagement and success expected from the substantial government expenditure on Indigenous education in the last decade, a plateau effect is now evident. After an initial burst of improvement in retention, attendance and academic achievement from the 1980s to the 1990s, improvement has settled into a pattern of small, incremental steps in all measures of educational outcomes. Rarely does the full complement of data relating to Indigenous school performance find its way into the public discourse. This is particularly apparent in relation to official inquiries, which rely on a more restricted range and interpretation of data. For example, data from independent or private schools--which are not so publicly accountable and do not attract much public attention in relation to educational outcomes for their Indigenous students--is usually inaccessible and not necessarily part of the data set informing policy, despite anecdotal evidence of successful strategies and outcomes.
The discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth in Australia is most apparent in relation to school completion and progression to higher education. The challenge of improving educational outcomes for Indigenous young people can be examined using three outcome measures: national school retention, school attendance, and benchmark data.
School retention
The proportion of Indigenous students who complete 12 years of schooling has trebled in the last 17 years, from 13 per cent in 1987 to 39 per cent in 2004. The census data from 1996-2004 in Table 1 illustrates this steady increase. The trend is particularly evident when considering retention to Year 11 level, where the apparent retention rate from Year 7/8 rose from 47 per cent in 1996 to 61 per cent in 2004.
But, when considering the increased retention for Indigenous students in relation to the non-Indigenous student population, the discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participation and retention across Australia remains stark. As outlined in Table 2 summarising Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 1996 to 2004 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, 2005) the gap becomes most apparent when considering secondary school data.
More importantly, although the retention rates for Indigenous students have improved over the last decade, a substantial gap remains.
The National Report to Parliament on Indigenous Education and Training (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2004, p. xvii) reports that:
* indigenous students are less likely to obtain a Year 12 certificate than non-Indigenous students
* of those who do obtain a Year 12 certificate, Indigenous students are less likely to gain a Universities Admission Index (UAI)
* of those who obtain a UAI, Indigenous students are less likely to gain a UAI of high level, or of a level which will enable admission to university, and
* Indigenous students are more likely than non-Indigenous students to choose a pathway leading to a post-school low-level vocational educational qualification rather than further academic qualifications.
The disparity in educational involvement continues beyond secondary school and training. Disproportionately few Aboriginal students enrol in tertiary education, and even fewer graduate. Indigenous students represent 1.2 per cent of domestic higher-education students, although they compose 2.5 per cent of the national population (James & Devlin, 2006, p. 16). Fewer than half of the Indigenous students who enrol in higher education complete their degree (James & Devlin, 2006, p. 20). While about 25 per cent of Australians hold university degrees, only 1.3 per cent of Australian Aborigines do so (Hickling-Hudson & Ahlquist, 2003, p. 69). Post-secondary attainment, the completion rate for Aboriginal tertiary students decreases significantly for those who either come from or undertake study in remote rural areas (Ainsworth & Hansen, 2006; Cotton, 1984).
School attendance
For students to achieve the expected outcomes of schooling, regular attendance is essential, as emphasised in the recent PISA report (Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), 2007). This is of particular importance in the Australian education systems given the current premise that incremental growth is dependent on a linear trajectory, sustained by regular attendance and maximum time on task (Collins, 1999). Bourke and colleagues (2000) report that teachers believe school attendance is essential for educational success. Mellor and Corrigan (2004) emphasise the critical role of regular school attendance in improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students:
Regular and high levels of attendance are important for all students--to maintain a similar rate of learning as their peers, to achieve sufficient knowledge and skills to reach the required standards for each level and to be able to move on to the subsequent higher level (Mellor & Corrigan, 2004, p. 27).
Indigenous students in Australia attend school less frequently than the rest of the student population. In the course of their school careers, on average, they spend at least two fewer years at school than non-Indigenous students. In addition, they are more likely to leave school early (Mellor & Corrigan, 2004; Partington et al., in press; Ross & Gray, 2005). In 1998 the apparent national retention rate for
Indigenous Australians for Years 7-12 was 32.1 per cent, less than half the rate (72.7 per cent) achieved by other Australians, with Indigenous males...
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