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June 26th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Poor-performing schools are the main reason indigenous students don’t reach minimum education standards, a scathing new report says.
The report on indigenous education from the Centre of Independent Studies released on Wednesday says much is made of the fact a majority of indigenous students reach the minimum standard.
But a sizeable minority is still failing.
Only Queensland and Western Australia are making progress towards a COAG target of halving the gap in academic achievement by 2018, but the report says all states and territories will struggle to actually reach it.
“Governments and education departments refuse to face the evidence that school ethos and classroom instruction are at the heart of education problems,” researchers Helen Hughes and Mark Hughes write.
“Non-performing schools are the principal cause of indigenous student failure.”
They say indigenous children have the same intellectual capabilities as non-indigenous students but are betrayed by under-performing schools.
They found that many children attended schools in low socio-economic areas which tended to have lower results overall and low expectations about the achievements of all students, indigenous or otherwise.
As well, truancy was exacerbated by unemployment or welfare dependence, the researchers said, and students could not achieve well if they weren’t going to school.
“Fiddling with truancy laws is like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic,” the researchers said.
The report is highly critical of programs which specifically target indigenous students, saying most of the $360 million spent each year is wasted on “counterproductive ‘feel-good,’ ‘culturally appropriate’ programs that take time and attention from classroom instruction”.
It said it was clear that the high levels of expenditure over the past decade had not resulted in even minimal improvements in literacy and numeracy results.
The researchers called for governments to change their goal to achieving equal outcomes for all students within the decade.
“Halving the gap is not an acceptable target,” they said.
To boost underperforming schools, principals should get autonomy of hiring, budgeting and managing schools and be held accountable for NAPLAN results.
Finally, the report recommends governments reform welfare and increase indigenous employment.
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