More Aboriginal children making it right to the top

In the Sydney Morning Herald, “More Aboriginal children making it right to the top” discusses how aboriginal students such as Lincoln Whietey, is becoming one of a growing number of indigenous students boarding at prestigious private schools. According to the Australian Boarding Schools Associations, “almost 3000 indigenous students are enrolled in boarding schools this year.” 

Marcia Langton believes there should be more partnerships between indigenous communities and top schools for indigenous students to attend boarding school. There has been significant growth of students in the scholarship program run by the Australian Indigenous Education, where it has “grown from one student in 2008 to almost 300 last year.”

However, Waverly Stanley, Yalari founder, admits there are challenges ahead for those indigenous students to change their lifestyle from living in remote areas to boarding schools. He believes “it’s about picking the right children, with the right family support to go to the right school.” 

As a result, inevitable there has been a number of students who have drop out, however from the 64 who have graduated they have gone to study in the fields such as physiotherapy, dentistry, teaching, fashion and vet science.

This article disagrees with Ford (2013) statements that “the longer an indigenous student remains at school there is an increasing likelihood of doing worse in terms of educational achievement compare to non-indigenous students.” As Ford believes education is making it worse for the students, however this article shows there have been a significant number of indigenous students, who have been successful in attending boarding schools. 

Ford believes education is making it worse for the indigenous student as “it seems arguments about a culturally inappropriate test can be co-opted to dismiss poor result rather than seriously examining and changing the content of the tests in the first place, or indeed the curriculum and pedagogical practices. In CRT terms this would be labeled as epistemological racism (Villalpando and Delgado 2002).” Ladson-Billings (2004 in Gillborn 2008, 91) has observed, “a poor quality curriculum coupled with poor quality instruction, a poorly prepared teacher, and limited resources add up to poor performance on so-called objective tests.”

However this article believes that indigenous students will have a good education if their have the “right family support” and if they “go to the right school,” so the content of the test and the curriculum is not the only reasons indigenous students does not perform well in school. 

I believe there are other factors affects the indigenous student’s performance, and it’s not only the content of the test and curriculum, that makes these students not do well in school, but they need the family support, to support them to do well in education. As Waverly Stanley states “I always remind these children that the only difference between this generation and their grandparents is education opportunities.”

Reference:

• Ford, M. (2013). Achievement gaps in Australia: what NAPLAN reveals about education inequality in Australia, Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 80-102.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12

•  McNeilage, A. More Aboriginal children making it right to the top, retrieved October 28, 2013, from http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/more-aboriginal-children-making-it-right-to-the-top-20130810-2rovd.html