Flaws in Indigenous Scholarship Program

3. Is this the best way for Government to invest in overcoming Indigenous disadvantage in education?

A recent post on the AIEF website provided the following justification for the Government investing in its work:

We agree that governments must invest in improving education results for all Indigenous students in all schools, but the evidence is unambiguous – for decades billions of dollars a year has been spent by state and federal governments on Indigenous programs that their own departments and officials have described as 'disappointing at best and appalling at worst' and making no difference to the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. So if the rhetoric about evidence-based policy means anything, it's critical that AIEF's proven, scalable and sustainable model continues to be supported (my emphasis).

In other words Governments should be prioritising investments that improve the outcomes for Indigenous students across the board, this is not a worthwhile investment because of a lot of money has been wasted on a futile exercise to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students across the board. Therefore the Government should now invest in improving educational outcomes for the few and forget about the rest.

This is a chilling piece of logic.

Basically, if you are indigenous and living in a remote community, welcome to the lottery – if you win a scholarship and are flown away to an elite school, you will learn to read and can expect to live a rich rewarding life, but if you don't, good luck. This feels like a future dystopia in a speculative fiction novel.

It is the Government's responsibility to govern for all Australians.

No Government can justify diverting the small amount of funds dedicated to meeting the educational needs of Australia's most seriously disadvantaged students to fund a lucky win-the-lottery ticket to a privileged life - a rags to riches scenario.

Yes, improving educational outcomes for our most disadvantaged – Indigenous Australians living in remote and very remote Australia – is a wicked policy issue. While there has been a lot of hand wringing about the lack of progress and some policy floundering there are some important critiques that have not been well explored. Some of these critiques give pointers to the development of new approaches that have potential to build into a more evidence-based approach – one that is more likely to make a difference.

Tom Calma in a 2008 report identified that disadvantaged funding all too often comes as short term optional extras – imposed from the outside, as educational fads come and go, imposing unreasonable reporting imposts and folding before any impact can be made or assessed.

Marcia Langton argued that Commonwealth funding to address Indigenous disadvantage is all too frequently misused by some states and territories for other purposes, resulting in chronic under-servicing in Indigenous communities. The most obvious example is indigenous housing where the average number of persons per home in many communities is around 15-18. Try and imagine getting your children to have a shower, eat breakfast, put on clean clothes and get to school where this is your day lived reality.

I recently outlined how the 2008 COAG shift to outcomes only reporting - using a small number of high level mainstream outcomes - is problematic because a) it assumes fidelity of intent on the part of states and Territories and b) uses indicators that are completely inappropriate for the specific circumstances of remote Indigenous students.