Pearson delivers withering assessment of education system

Australian primary schools are failing an estimated 25 per cent of all students by persisting with teaching methods that reflect rather than transform the circumstances they were born into, Cape York leader Noel Pearson says.

Cape York Institute founder and Indigenous leader Noel Pearson. Picture: Sean Davey

Australian primary schools are failing an estimated 25 per cent of all students by persisting with teaching methods that reflect rather than transform the circumstances they were born into, Cape York leader Noel Pearson says.

Mr Pearson’s fourth Boyer Lecture, broadcast by ABC Radio National on Sunday, is a withering assessment of an education system he says ignores the well-established science of reading and how to teach it. He catalogues tragic consequences for children who needed to be explicitly taught the foundations of English.

“The inability to read is in my view the universal explanation of why bright, irrepressible primary schoolers turn into sullen, disengaged high schoolers who drop out. I see this play out in depressing succession – involving hundreds and thousands of lives,” Mr Pearson said in his lecture.

Mr Pearson argues the answer has been in front of us for years. The late Professor Ken Rowe’s National Reading Inquiry in 2005 recommended the explicit teaching of foundational reading skills including phonics – as similar inquiries in the US and Britain had done.

Yet flawed methods of teaching reading still predominate in Australian classrooms, he said.

“And because reading is fundamental to all other learning, this failure is destroying the education of these children and their lives,” he said.

The Cape York Institute founder dedicated his lecture to the memory of teenager Chris Drage, a Noongar boy from Perth who struggled with reading.

Chris Drage. Picture: Facebook

“In 2018 I read a story in The Australian about the 16-year-old Aboriginal boy who tragically drowned in the Swan River with his best friend following a police chase. It was like so many stories of young black lives cut short that you read in the news regularly. The story affected me, and I followed the subsequent coronial inquiry,” Mr Pearson said.

The Australian’s reporters, Andrew Burrell and Paige Taylor, wrote about Chris in consultation with his mother, Winnie Hayward. She told them he was once a cheery and cheeky kid who grew into a champion athlete and a skilful junior footballer.

Mr Pearson in his lecture read from the story, which told readers: “Yet by the time he was a teenager, Chris had dropped out of high school – never to return – and stopped playing sport, becoming distant from his mother who worried incessantly about her beloved boy. His pastimes, instead, involved smoking weed and he began to hang out with a pack of wayward Aboriginal boys who, like him, never had a father figure in their lives and seemed to lack direction.”

Ms Hayward noticed her son had learning difficulties. He was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. His school provided special tuition, but classes continued to confound him and reading was almost impossible.

His loving, dedicated mother did everything to give her children a better life, Mr Pearson said. She said Chris taught himself to read on Facebook.

“I believe Chris would have survived his absent father. I am convinced he would have prevailed over his ADHD and dyslexia. He had the unstinting love of his single mother, and that could have been enough,” he said. “My belief is Chris’s school education failed him. His primary education failed to teach him to read.”

Mr Pearson said reading theorist Kevin Wheldall once explained that in any given classroom 25 per cent of students would learn to read no matter what, 50 per cent would learn if taught competently by whatever approach, and 25 per cent would never read without explicit instruction.

“I call this the Wheldall rule and I see it play out time and time again in schools and in their data,” Mr Pearson said.

Indigenous children comprised a large proportion of that bottom 25 per cent. Chris was one of them, Mr Pearson said. “I read his coronial report and it clearly failed to diagnose the true reason why his family lost their beautiful boy in such a tragedy.

“The coroner and those conducting the inquest had no idea what they were witnessing.

“This is the pipeline from the failure to learn because of the failure to teach. To truancy and disengagement. To street life and petty crime. To juvenile detention and adult incarceration. Hiding in plain sight behind all of the factors involved in teenage disengagement and offending is prior primary school illiteracy. Australian public discourse focuses on the symptoms of this failure and is completely blind to its cause.”