Opinion piece in The Australian newspaper on Indigenous education in NT

[John Bowden]

Hi to all

I thought members of the list might be interested in an opinion piece in 
today's online 'Australian' which speaks of poor performance in remote 
schools in the Northern Territory and makes some derogatory claims about 
bilingual education programs. I've cut and pasted the first couple of 
paragraphs below. It appears as a blog in the online edition of the Oz, 
so anyone can make a comment. Full link to article appears below the 
exctract.

Best wishes to all
John


  Separatist schooling a failure in the NT

Helen and Mark Hughes

*WHEN we drew attention to the failures of Northern Territory schooling 
in April this year, our report, Indigenous Education in the Northern 
Territory, was said to be poorly researched, relying on sensationalist 
and emotive anecdotes of one-off instances. NT Education Minister Marion 
Scrymgour described our analysis as a flimsy and selective diatribe 
about remote education in the territory. The release of this year's 
national literacy and numeracy test results unfortunately vindicated our 
analysis.*

The NT performed abysmally on every indicator. Queensland and Western 
Australia also had lower achievement levels, but they were not of the 
same crisis proportions as the territory. In these two states and the 
NT, the failure to deliver mainstream education to children in welfare 
dependent indigenous communities was the cause of poor performance.

for the full article see   
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24357436-5013480,00.html