Indigenous ‘carve out’: Is this a return to the ‘reading wars’?

School students in their classroom at Tullawong State School, north of Brisbane.

Two cheers for recent moves to ensure trainee teachers are better equipped to teach English and literacy. Not three. Not yet anyway.

As this newspaper reported last week, all non-Indigenous trainee teachers must pass a test known as LANTITE (Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education students) during the first year of their degree. Why this hasn’t been the case forever beggars belief. And we wonder why NAPLAN scores are on the slide.

Isn’t it bleedingly obvious that basic literacy and numeracy must start on day one – for teachers and students alike?

The new standards released by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership require trainee teachers to be taught to use explicit instruction – a practical step-by-step teaching method that has been championed for years by many people who have looked closely at what works and what doesn’t.

Noel Pearson has been a terrific supporter of explicit instruction as the obvious way to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged kids with evidence-based education. In a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies in 2021, Pearson was characteristically blunt: “I want to start with one brief thing about evidence: we need no more evidence about what works.

“The evidence has been well known about what works for children’s reading, numeracy and learning generally. It is just that there has been a concerted effort to impede the known and very effective means by which children could learn in Australian schools – and it is the disadvantaged that have suffered the most.”

The evidence, said Pearson, was that direct instruction worked best for children.

The interminable delay in arriving at this point, where teachers receive early training in direct instruction, reveals how education has become a battleground where activists play and students suffer.

Many years ago, when writing about the evidence behind phonics – the explicit instruction method for teaching kids to read – I was horrified to discover that many on the loud left regarded it as some kind of political project of the right to hijack education. No kidding. The so-called “reading wars” were a shocking indictment of the education class.

Noel Pearson

Will the caveat to these new reforms prove to be yet another indictment of the education elites?

The new rules that require more rigorous literacy and numeracy training do not apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trainee teachers. The carve-out is aimed at addressing the teacher shortages, dismal school attendance rates and educational gaps in many remote Indigenous communities.

The new standards say: “In the case of First Nations language speakers, recognition of First Nations language proficiency by the relevant cultural authority is an acceptable alternative standard.

“(University) providers must have an established process to confirm recognition of First Nations language proficiency.’’

The shortage of teachers in regional and remote parts of Australia, especially in remote Indigenous communities, is a diabolic problem for the students most in need of education to improve their life chances. There is no quick fix.

Different rules – for a time – for Indigenous trainee teachers may be needed. But if this carve-out from more effective teaching standards leads to a permanent two-tiered teaching profession, Indigenous teachers and students will suffer the most. Unless closely monitored, these lower standards for Indigenous trainee teachers risk reinforcing the curse of low expectations for these teachers and their students alike.

Apart from what this caveat means for Indigenous students, one wonders what it means for Indigenous teachers. Does it mean that newly trained Indigenous teachers who have reached the same standards as their non-Indigenous peers can teach only in Indigenous schools?

The ultimate aim should be for Indigenous teachers to be as equipped as other teachers so they can move between schools, experience different forms of education – public and private, regional and city, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

How often we see well-meaning affirmative action policies, which might make sense as special measures for a limited time, becoming permanent. Through complacency or cowardice, positive discrimination often continues long after it has become counter-productive.

Like the reading activists who were blind to the clear evidence of explicit instruction, those who favour two-tiered teaching standards now may be too invested to ever see the light that comes from evidence-based pedagogy.

As the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination recognises, there may be rare circumstances where measures of positive discrimination may be necessary, but these must not be continued “after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved” lest they become a new and permanent form of discrimination.

The education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students remains one of this country’s biggest public policy failures. Just as we don’t need more evidence about what works in schools – because we know – we don’t need more reports tracking the numbers of Indigenous educational disadvantage.

We know that Indigenous students in remote schools start well behind students in mainstream schools and rarely catch up.

NT Opposition Leader Lia Finocchiaro, The Nationals Northern Australia Shadow Minister Susan McDonald and NT Senator Jacinta Price. Picture: Fia Walsh.

We know the reasons Indigenous kids fall behind, and stay behind: dismal rates of school attendance and differences in teacher and teaching quality. We don’t need new reports, either, about the link between poverty, violence, poor health, family dysfunction and educational disadvantage. We need solutions.

Last Friday the Northern Territory’s new Opposition Leader, Lia Finocchiaro, promised to tackle the former. She committed to using income management tools, ignored by the Territory Labor government, to ensure that parents send their children to school.

“We want greater accountability and responsibility of parents in getting their kids to school because we know a lot of these kids engaging in the justice system aren’t being supported to access an education,” Finocchiaro said.

“Nothing is off the table. We have to be getting kids to school, we have to be protecting young people who are being neglected and on a pathway to crime, and we have to be giving these kids an opportunity to change their lives before it’s too late.”

On education, Pearson deserves the last word.

“Aboriginal children are no different from other human children,” he said.

“They have the same capacity and they have the same learning mechanism … there’s nothing sui generis about Indigenous children. They’re human. If they’re taught with effective pedagogy, they will learn.”

We should remain vigilant about the ultimate aim of these new literacy and numeracy reforms: to ensure they are nationwide and colourblind, so every student prospers from well-trained teachers. The education gap won’t be filled by entrenching a second-class approach to literacy and numeracy for Indigenous children.