From: The Australian

May 11, 2013 12:00AM

“GET ready!” A hand-clap. The children lean forward in their seats, expectant, alert.

“What colour?” their teacher calls out. “What number?” The replies come back in unison. The mood is focused; the pace swift. New words, facts, concepts are brought in one by one, and reappear all through the lesson and reinforce each other. This is concentrated learning, with a swing and urgency about it.

In a small classroom in Aurukun on the west coast of Cape York, step by step, the everyday wonder of Direct Instruction is unfolding. Here, in the far reaches of far north Queensland, in a remote Aboriginal community, something remarkable is taking place: young boys and girls are at their desks, studying, writing, absorbing every piece of knowledge offered them. It is the dream that has seemed beyond realisation in recent years: a remote-area indigenous school where the students are bound for success. Is the dream at last being fulfilled?

Aurukun is the showpiece campus of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy, key project of the region’s great reformer, Noel Pearson: a school run almost entirely on the basis of the Direct Instruction system; a school already much inspected and evaluated, eagerly praised and pre-emptively critiqued. But only now, two years into the venture, is there something of substance to assess: data, initial evidence to go with the impressions that days spent in the classrooms leave in the mind.

First, though, the strange backstory: the tale of how Direct Instruction, “DI”, an American teaching method pioneered in Illinois and Oregon, and much used in public schools in US inner cities, came to Cape York. The story is bound up with Pearson’s path in life. Mission-born at Hope Vale on the Cape’s east coast, gifted, given educational opportunities, he went to boarding schools and to university, became a lawyer, and made his name, while still young, as a native title advocate.

Then he changed priorities. He went back to far north Queensland. His home region was in crisis. The chief causes were plain to him: alcoholic drinking, passive welfare provision and a breakdown in schooling. Pearson devised a comprehensive strategy for social change, and after a long struggle on the battlefield of ideas persuaded governments and senior bureaucrats to back his vision.

Four communities opted in: Hope Vale; the little, range-surrounded town of Coen at the heart of the Cape; Mossman Gorge near Port Douglas; and the large settlement of Aurukun, home and capital of the Wik people. The Cape York welfare reform trial began in mid-2008: its key innovation was the Family Responsibilities Commission, a panel of local leaders with the power to impose income management on community members whose actions are doing harm to those around them.

The trial had many facets. It included measures for financial management and home improvement, but at its core was an even more ambitious reform plan: Pearson’s blueprint for a network of top-flight primary schools, and an academy, with high aims and concrete proposals to realise them. From his own experience he knew that education liberates. Get the schooling right, and anything is possible.

What would be the best replacement for the long-established, lacklustre approach? He had investigated teaching models: promising schemes and remedial programs, motivational initiatives from around the world. One stood out: DI, the brainchild of a most unusual professorial pioneer named Siegfried Engelmann.

Pearson recounts his discovery of DI and the development of the Cape York Academy concept in a slim book he published two years ago, titled Radical Hope. It contains a brief afterword in which the very first field reports from the DI classrooms are set down.

They were positive, and even then Pearson was optimistic, with good reason. DI is straightforward, and based on close study of the way a child’s mind works. It is a teaching method, as well as a tightly controlled curriculum. Above all, its track record proves its effectiveness. It works wherever it is properly implemented: in the poor suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, where Cape York community leaders saw it in action on a study tour; in the disadvantaged regions of the US Midwest; in native-American schools in Arizona and New Mexico.

Pearson was also confident in the group of educators he had assembled. The first executive principal of the academy, Don Anderson, was one of the most admired figures in Queensland’s education system. Anderson had become convinced DI had something to offer, and that the old model had failed, for tangled reasons. He had spent his working life in remote schools: at Lockhart River and Aurukun and Weipa on the Cape, at schools and colleges in the Torres Strait. He knew the trends.

“I had watched a continual decline over years,” Anderson says. “A decline both in educational outcomes and in opportunities for indigenous children.

“And now, being involved in the first sustainable, significant recovery in schools performance, I’m more than happy to admit that much of our hard work in the past was misdirected and ill-conceived, even though we were giving 110 per cent.”

Anderson grasped, then, the need for change, and the rationale, but he had to find a crack team to introduce it. And so, in early 2010, as soon as the deal to launch the academy model at the schools in Coen and Aurukun was struck, he placed a call to a handful of dedicated remote-area teachers, including one named Patrick Mallett, an individual with a pronounced taste for challenges. Mallett, today the principal at Aurukun, remembers driving in to the community that February, beneath wet season storm clouds.

“I arrived. Was this it? It was bizarre. There were children wandering about in the school grounds, a crowd of them were playing on the roof in the middle of class time. I’d never seen a campus so disengaged. Dysfunction permeated the whole place, it didn’t feel like a school at all. The task seemed Herculean. But day by day, week by week, we began, we made progress. And for the children the penny dropped relatively early on that their teachers were now taking their education and advancement absolutely critically. Once they worked out that they could actually learn to read and write, their self-esteem rocketed.”

Those early successes did not come merely from following a tuition model brought in from outside. Great care went into the design of the academy’s curriculum, which is now also taught in the large school at Hope Vale.

It has three components: “class”, the core DI program, which delivers 20 hours of literacy and numeracy teaching every week; “club”, which gives lessons in sports and music; and “culture”, a subject-group that includes local languages and traditional and environmental knowledge, and has a syllabus designed by the academy’s own team. Club and culture are taught after normal school hours, in optional lessons that extend the school day by 90 minutes: attendance is almost universal.

A process of constant student assessment is at the heart of DI. Each child must learn each lesson, and achieve mastery, in reading, in writing, in the new concepts introduced in class every day. Individual tests are quietly administered to check progress every week. At the week’s end, the teachers make a call to their American DI learning colleagues to go through the results. Each student’s performance is checked. If a child or group of children lag in any area, they are split from their class and taught in a new group: they will not be left behind.

There are other safety nets. Regular attendance is one obvious key to classroom success, and in remote communities typically it is the chief problem. At Aurukun, a pair of dedicated case managers watch the school gates every morning, then travel round the community to seek out the no-shows. Any child who comes in more than half an hour late goes on a watch list. Three late days in a row triggers a referral of their parents or guardians to the Family Responsibilities Commission. This measure has helped lift attendance to 75 per cent.

Maryann Kerindun, both a traditional owner of land estates near Aurukun and a long-time teacher assistant at the school, can see the difference. “In the old curriculum, we had problems,” she says. “A child could not recognise a letter; a child could not recognise a number. Learning struggled through those times.

“Then the changes began with this new system. They’ve come a long way. With this new set-up, with this DI in the classroom, you see the children focused, they’re blossoming, they’re surprising their own families.”

The experience has been similar at the Coen campus, which began DI instruction at the same time, early 2010. There, Billy Pratt, a local with three children at the school and one in daycare, about to begin classes, has come to believe in the new system. Pratt is a member of the academy board, and heads a new regional ranger group. He looks back to his own childhood, when he had to rely on outside mentors to make progress.

“One thing we could never figure out was how come a teacher could achieve in the mainstream schools, but not here, in the bush,” he says. “Now DI has come in, I think it works because of the method, and the constant testing and measuring. They don’t let the students go from grade to grade without picking up anything.

“My children get a much better learning experience than I did. You need to stretch children: I want mine to be engaged, not get bored and rebel. My second, she’s two years ahead of what’s expected for a child her age. She comes home and wants to teach us; she’s embraced it.”

DI has its critics: fierce ones, who object to its use of textbooks with American examples, or contend that its scripted lessons reduce teachers to a robotic role, or argue that its field results in the Cape York setting are equivocal.

The view among the teachers is rather different. The pattern now in Aurukun, by no means an easy posting, is for frontline staff to stay much longer than the two-year minimum they initially sign on for. “We’ve lived it, we see it every day,” says the head of the DI team at Aurukun, Naomi Gibb. “If I hadn’t experienced this over the last 3 1/2years myself, I’d be sceptical. This whole model is building an intrinsic drive in students.”

Other teachers speak admiringly of the determination their students show to get to school. The backdrop of their lives may include sleeplessness and domestic troubles: still they come. They come not for metronomic instruction but because the spark of curiosity has been lit in them.

DI lessons, as witnessed in the classrooms of the Cape, are a striking affair. A sense of excitement is present, and also a mood of harmonious forward momentum. Coen’s teaching principal, Craig Jordan, argues that “DI has taken the focus off what you teach, and on to how you teach”. The executive principal now overseeing the entire three-campus academy, Cindy Hales, is convinced this aspect of the method is central to its effectiveness. “Just because DI’s scripted doesn’t mean there’s no life or heart,” she says. “It’s a kind of persuasive acting, a drama that makes learning live in the minds of children. People think it’s easy and rote just because it’s written down – but the hardest part is the transition to a learning life in the classroom: it’s hard, good work.”

This strong sense of purpose fills the schools. Motivation and positive reinforcement are taken seriously: the entrance hallways are festooned with examples of standout work. The ultra-Pearsonian credo of the academy – “Get Ready. Work Hard. Be Good” – is displayed everywhere, as are lists of benchmarks and goals. “Terrific work-books in Miss Grace’s classroom,” proclaims one notice, and there they are, photocopied and affixed, examples for emulation – long cascading sentence sequences in neat copperplate handwriting.

 In class, the messages are much the same. Courtesy mingles with high expectations. “Boys and girls, you did that exercise so well: now, what are the things we do to be respectful? Teaching, listening, not talking. Good, good, Elspeth, I can see you’re reading; and you too, Wilfred, with your finger, tracking.” They are the atmospherics of the well-run schoolroom, completely normal and, in the context of a remote community, very rarely seen.

How to measure the vast collective effort engaged in by the academy’s designers and staff, and by the children and families whose support lies at the project’s heart? How to catch the alchemy that has brought hope and self-belief to communities long used to the lash of media stereotyping and negative publicity? What table of statistics records that? But testing and evaluation are constant features of the education landscape, and the academy, as an institution that inevitably serves to highlight the shortcomings of the status quo in remote community schooling, has been subject to intense scrutiny.

Much is riding on its performance. Experts from the bureaucracy are watching; critics of Pearson and his broader social intervention programs as well. Both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are supporters of the scheme. The Prime Minister was instrumental in persuading the then state premier, Anna Bligh, to provide the initial three-year tranche of funding, $7.72 million – still the only large support the academy has received. The Opposition Leader led a team of corporate high-fliers on his “bricks and mortar” library-building working bee at Aurukun a year ago.

Hence the keen interest paid to the latest round of results in the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, for the three academy schools when they appeared last September; hence the disquiet when some of the figures from Aurukun showed a mild decline in performance in some subject areas. Less attention was paid to the spectacular test results from Coen, which had been a school with high attendance rates even before the switch to the academy template: it was the best-performing indigenous-area school in Queensland, with all students achieving scores “at or above national minimum standards” in 10 out of the 15 test categories.

For Aurukun, the starting point had been very different: in early 2010, almost all the students were reading at kindergarten levels, or below, and attendance levels were abysmal. In such small campuses, NAPLAN’s sampling may record little beyond the variations in the performance of individual pupils in different years.

There are other measures that track the gradual progress of the students at the Cape York schools, rather than seeking to judge their capabilities in a single snap test: both the routine internal monitoring and the Queensland Education Department reviews are favourable, while a forthcoming Australian Council for Educational Research report is expected also to highlight the state of progress in clear fashion.

The academy has always seen its project as a long-term remedial venture: its prospectus warns that it “does not expect significant gains in NAPLAN results until 2013-14, allowing children, especially older children, at least three full years to catch up to grade level”. Consistent with this, the best performances at all its schools are among the youngest students, with the least pronounced educational shortfall to overcome.

Given Pearson’s profile and the high stakes attached to the overall Cape York Welfare Reform scheme, cool assessment of the DI curriculum’s long-term potential seems all the more important. For the academy is part of an experiment with both educational and political resonances. The Cape York Institute’s linked projects are aimed to recast the economy of a remote region, invigorate a society trapped by passive welfare systems and inject a note of hope into its young generation through concerted learning programs.

The link between education and welfare reform is a bond. The schools rely on the parental discipline the Family Responsibilities Commission helps impose: and the academy aims to send its students away to boarding facilities at the secondary level, before they return to take up jobs in a revitalised local economy.

There is, though, one telling difference between the welfare reform initiative and the academy, and it explains their relative effectiveness: the multiple welfare reforms are opt-in, and secure limited participation; the schools are the sole providers of primary education where they operate.

The wash-up? Increasingly, those close to the academy believe they have found a wondrous weapon in the fight to strengthen remote indigenous communities: a tool to reverse the pernicious effects produced by two generations of poor learning.

Patrick Mallett, surveying his quiet, well-ordered school grounds at Aurukun, says: “When you have the right curriculum, the right approach and the right structures, you get the community on board, and it happens. I came very quickly to realise that DI was a miracle that had dropped out of the sky, and the people here were the best I’d ever worked with. We’ve stumbled on the solution to what has been perplexing the rest of Australia.”

In the communities, a sense is dawning that the schools can develop into instruments for large-scale social change. At Coen, teacher aide Majella Peter is studying for an education degree at Deakin University and watching the classroom progress of her daughter, now in Year Three. “For me, as a parent, seeing DI opened my eyes: it actually works in lifting literacy and numeracy, and young mothers in this community know it’s working.”

Peter wants to be a lifelong educator, teach for a decade at the school, become principal there and then open an adult learning centre. “That would be my personal goal: I see my relations living on Centrelink and I feel for them; they can’t go forward because they don’t have much education, and I feel that could be part of the reason they don’t have their life straight – and maybe in time, maybe, if they’re responsible, they can straighten their career paths and look to the future.”

At Aurukun, Maryann Kerindun has also seen things she never thought she would. “What blows me away is having my grandchild coming home and saying to me, ‘Let’s read together’. That’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me, to be able to see that with my own eyes.” A further vision shimmers into view, and seems more than a dream: “I want to see a qualified nurse from this community working at the clinic, a qualified CEO, a teacher, a mechanic, a doctor, and a self-managed community, and I know now it can happen. I want to see our future generations run the school.”

With early word of the changed atmospherics in the academy schools beginning to spread, education bureaucrats, indigenous leaders and policy thinkers from across the country have begun to take note, and make visits, pilgrimages to the Cape: delegations have come from the Kimberley, northeast Arnhem Land and the Pitjantjatjara region.

The then chief executive of the Northern Territory’s Education Department, Gary Barnes, a Queensland veteran recently placed at the helm of the entire Territory public service, brought his key indigenous policy advisers on an inspection tour in 2011 but this keen interest has yet to translate into action, and it is hard to picture regions lacking the leadership of Cape York adopting the academy model, backed as it is by the overarching, regulating mechanism of welfare reform.

DI, though, has evident potential as a teaching method of proven adaptability, and Pearson and his advisers have put forward a proposal to set up an Australian Institute for Direct Instruction, in partnership with Engelmann’s Institute in Oregon. The story is at its beginning: the academy hopes, in due course, to extend its operations to between six and eight schools in the Cape, to achieve economies of scale.

If the promise of a new approach to remote-area learning is in the air, and the progress of DI on the Cape is a fascinating case study for southern experts, it means much more elsewhere. Aurukun and Coen are not just possible examples for other communities, intriguing options; they are hope, new pathways made visible. For everyone aware of the bleak lives being given form today in half-empty classrooms the length and breadth of remote indigenous Australia, the question of schooling models has a sharp edge.

Even those who were at first sceptical on the ground have swung about, as if the longing to believe there could be a light of promise has at last vanquished the ingrained expectation of failure, eclipse, and another new program to replace the one before.

Here is one of the most prominent woman leaders of Aurukun, the redoubtable Maree Kalkeeyorta – sister of the strong-minded Gladys Tybingoompa, who danced on the pavement of the High Court in Canberra on the day the Wik won their native title case almost two decades ago.

“I didn’t like these changes at first, but I see things now. My sister wanted our children to learn, and I too. English, and our own Wik language way as well. We want the two. Our own way, and the way of outside Australia.

“I think life will improve now for the next generation. Look at them! They laugh, and smile, they love their school, you can see the happy faces. As long as it takes them, they’ll follow their path now; they have a path. Every individual child has a pathway to go down, but it’s going to start off in this schoolground first.”

From: The Australian

May 11, 2013 12:00AM

NO matter what you know, it’s who you know. No matter how great you are, you got to know somebody. – Ted Hawkins, Ladder of Success

BY definition, socially disadvantaged people do not have networks of opportunity. While they interact with government service providers, they do not have networks in the private and professional sectors. The networks of opportunity advantaged people use every day and that they take for granted are not available to disadvantaged people. They live in a different, closed world dominated by government and charitable services. Their access to information about where and how to pursue opportunities, or where a job, training or enterprise opportunity may be, is limited.

People from disadvantaged communities know, in ways that advantaged people do not, that many doors do not open from the outside. I do not know of any indigenous Australian on the board of a top 500 company. Even government appointments to boards other than those of specifically indigenous organisations exclude indigenous Australians. While there are increasing examples of indigenous people in the upper echelons of government, academe and the private sector, they are still scarce. Three per cent of the population comes nowhere near 3 per cent representation in any of the sectors of power and opportunity.

This year marks the 13th year of Jawun, a remarkable initiative aimed at opening the doors of opportunity in the private sector to Aborigines. Through it, hundreds of staff from the country’s leading corporate organisations – including the big four banks, KPMG, leading law firms such as Freehills, Qantas, Wesfarmers, QBE, IBM and many more – have partnered with indigenous communities.

We started Jawun in 2000 because we wanted a vehicle for corporate and philanthropic partnerships to help us prosecute our Cape York reform agenda. Then Queensland premier Peter Beattie convened a roundtable in Weipa that brought together a clutch of business executives and philanthropists. Ann Sherry, then a senior executive with Westpac, and Colin Carter from the Boston Consulting Group took the initiative and established a secondment program of staff from their organisations to work with Cape York organisations to develop and implement our reform ideas. Carter, an AFL commissioner, got together with two fellow Harvard alumni, Graeme Wise from The Body Shop Australia and Chris Bartlett, now a professor at Harvard – a perfect example of the advantage of networks.

Since Sherry kicked off the Westpac partnership we have had hundreds of Westpac people contribute to our work in Cape York. Experts in banking, information technology, project management, strategy, communications and so on have helped us get to where we are today.

This week Queensland Aboriginal Affairs Minister Glen Elmes launched a book by former magistrate Dean Wood on the story of the Family Responsibilities Commission. I was reminded that while the FRC was an idea I had developed, the young man responsible for turning it into a plan was Bevan McKenzie, a young New Zealander seconded by the BCG to work with me. The lawyer and Oxford graduate who helped develop the legislation now works in international aid. We have lost count of the Harvard, Oxford, Yale and Princeton graduates who have spent three months or three years working with us. Indeed our first BCG secondee, Alan Tudge, is now the Liberal federal member for the seat of Aston in Melbourne. Two others are deputy secretaries in Canberra.

Not only do these organisations bring corporate networks with them, the individuals bring their personal networks as well. Therefore we’ve had a string of Rhodes scholars work with us over the years. It reminds me of the time former Liberal Party senator Fred Chaney was out camping with young boys from the Boys from the Bush program with Tony Abbott, long before he became Opposition Leader. Surprised to learn Abbott was a Rhodes scholar, Chaney brazenly said, “Gee, they must give the Rhodes to anybody.”

The breakthrough concept championed by Sherry and Carter involved four key elements.

First, they focused on providing us with their most important resource: their people. Our great deficit is people with know-how, experience, expertise and networks. The Jawun partnerships help by fixing our people deficit.

Second, they support our leadership and our agenda. They do not have their own agendas, they help us to pursue our goals.

Third, they help us build capacity. Through the high-quality people they second, our organisations have increased their capabilities tenfold.

Fourth, they help us do the one thing government can never do: innovate. Our innovations in welfare reform and education would never be possible if governments were our only source of partnership. Governments are, by their very nature, averse to risk and unwilling to support new approaches and new ideas. Our education initiative, Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy, is the result of seed investment by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and corporate secondments from Westpac, St George and IBM.

Finally, they commit to a development agenda for the long haul. Jawun represents a departure from the traditional model of corporate philanthropy where support is provided to individual organisations for individual initiatives. The Jawun model is focused on long-term social change.

Since its genesis in Cape York, Jawun has established similar partnerships across the country, working in partnership with indigenous leaders and organisations in a diverse range of communities.

It has been working with Paul Briggs and a group of organisations around the Rumbalara Football & Netball Club in Shepparton, Victoria.

And since former Macquarie Bank head Tony Berg became chairman and former Qantas executive Karyn Baylis took over as chief executive, Jawun has ramped up partnerships in the East Kimberley with Ian Trust and the Wunan Foundation. It has established a partnership with Mick Mundine’s Aboriginal Housing Company and other organisations in Redfern and La Perouse, and with Sean Gordon and the Darkinjung land council on the NSW north coast.

It is in partnership with Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s organisations in northeast Arnhem Land and with Wayne Bergmann’s organisations in the west Kimberley.

It is in the early stages of working with Andrea Mason and leaders from the central desert Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council.

After more than a decade of working with corporate and philanthropic organisations through Jawun, it is clear to me our development goals will never be realised without expanding our networks into the sectors of power and opportunity. We cannot do it ourselves or with governments alone. Indeed exclusive government partnerships end up being a welfare trap. We need networks of opportunity that bring indigenous communities together with the private sector and government in order to achieve development.

As the Californian busker Ted Hawkins sang: “No matter what you know, it’s who you know.”

Noel Pearson chairs the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.

By Sharnie Kim

Posted Wed May 8, 2013 10:52am AEST

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson says he would like to see the Cape York welfare reform trial in far north Queensland play a bigger role in bringing children in state care back to their families.

Mr Pearson met Queensland Indigenous Affairs Minister Glen Elmes yesterday to discuss the future of the scheme.

The State Government is yet to commit to the trial beyond 2014.

Mr Pearson says the number of Indigenous children in the child protection system is a huge problem.

“Reuniting families, bringing children back from the child protection system,” he said.

“I want to see the FRC [Family Responsibilities Commission] play a role in restoring children back to functional families.

“It is a very distressing state of affairs when scores and scores of children are not living with their own families in their own community.”

Mr Pearson says talks centred on how the trial might be expanded.

“Now that we’ve got a trial and it’s worked, how would you scale the thing up so that other communities could be covered by these reforms?” he said.

“That requires consideration about how do you scale up something like the FRC.”

Noel Pearson is chair of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership

THE future of the Cape York Welfare Reform trial has been questioned after the state government this week reversed its decision to axe funding for the five-year program.

The state government has committed $5.65 million for another year of the trial, which started in 2008 as a joint funded project with the commonwealth government to improve social conditions in four Aboriginal communities, Mossman Gorge, Aurukun, Coen and Hope Vale.

Cape York Institute CEO Fiona Jose has welcomed the government’s change of heart but said it was disappointing the government had decided to cut the trial the day before an independent report was released evaluating the trial from the beginning until last year.

‘‘The most disappointing thing for Noel (Pearson) and us here at the institute is that public decision was made without due consideration of the report being made public, a report that is based on extensive consultation with all communities,’’ she said.

‘‘To me that is really letting down the people of Cape York who have taken their time to respond and who have told us in the report about changes from their perspective, which is backed by data.

‘‘In the last three years for the Mossman Gorge the biggest change has been around the gateway and more support services around income management and families managing money, the wellbeing centre, pride of place and the Families Responsibilities Commission. It’s having an affect across the community.’’

Ms Jose said the objectives of the CYWR trial are to revive social norms, restore indigenous authority in communities, addressing welfare issues and supporting engagement in the economy, moving from welfare housing to home ownership, improving school attendance in students and making full use of their talents.

‘‘It is not like a government policy on how to run and lead a community, the initiative has come from indigenous leaders of Cape York and their regions,’’ she said.

‘‘That’s why it is so important, it is actually transforming lives and the independent  valuation confirms this: school attendance is on the rise, families are managing their  money, children are happier and people are working to be better parents.

‘‘One of the key elements of this is restoring indigenous authority and FRC Commissioner Glasgow said more and more local commissioners are actually holding conferences themselves and really showing the value of indigenous people taking lead and counselling their people.’’

The next step for the CYWR trial is to work at making the reform more efficient and affordable and work on extending it to other communities in the Cape York, while continuing to work with the four current communities to continue to improve and grow.

‘‘The work we do is a generational change and although we are only five years into this, the results are there,’’ Ms Jose said.

Picture: David Geraghty  Source: News Limited

ABORIGINAL leader Noel Pearson says welfare entitlement has been “a tragic disability” for his people.

Mr Pearson has backed comments by indigenous academic Marcia Langton that a sense of entitlement had poisoned Aboriginal society.

“It’s been a tragic disability,” he told ABC TV last night.

“The flipside of the opening up of the doors of citizenship to our people, was the provision of welfare. What should have been provided was opportunities to engage in … the mainstream economy.”

Australia was now “reaping that tragedy”.

He also echoed Professor Langton’s statements about mining being a quiet revolution for indigenous people.

“The revolution she is talking about is one that is absolutely tectonically happening,” he said, adding that it was a strange irony.

Mr Pearson reflected on his “bitter” negotiations with Rio Tinto in his early years of work in the Cape York and how the changed paradigm was now creating a new Aboriginal middle class.

“We’ve got to embrace Aboriginal success,” he said.

“Money and materialism shouldn’t be an anathema to Aboriginal people.”

He said indigenous people needed to be striving for a better life.

“We still haven’t gotten out of the mindset of Aboriginal people being the poor, benighted victims in Australian society,” Mr Pearson said.

Mr Pearson is frustrated his far north Queensland Cape York welfare reform trials had not been able to achieve home ownership for any indigenous people in the trial communities.

“There are complexities of home ownership on Aboriginal land involving tenure,” he said.

“Many of the Aboriginal people in these communities earn full-time wages, work for adjacent mining companies, but they can’t own a home on their own land.”

The federal government was yet to heed his message that the focus on social housing should move to home ownership, Mr Pearson said.

The trials, under way in Coen, Aurukun, Mossman Gorge and Hope Vale, aim to restore local indigenous authority and improve living conditions and the local economy.

Mr Pearson is in remission from lymphoma and says 2012 was his “descent into hell”.

“But I had the great joy to spend 12 months with my youngest child,” he said.

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Source: Lateline | Duration: 16min 59sec Transcript

THERE are times when you have the opportunity to meet a true hero. I had that privilege this week. For his national political leadership I’m on a unity ticket with former Labor national president, Warren Mundine, the most capable indigenous Australian never to have been given the chance to serve in parliament. But he is not the Mundine I am talking about.

I met up with his cousin, Mick Mundine, the indefatigable head of the Aboriginal Housing Company, at the Block in Sydney’s Redfern. This Mundine is involved in a tougher line of business than the kind of leadership Warren and I are involved in. We are in the political talk business. Mick Mundine is in the political walk business.

He literally walked the streets of his community to take charge of the problems afflicting his people. His target was the scourge of drugs and alcohol that had seen the Block descend into a Hobbesian nightmare.

I recall the long campaign he waged against the needle-exchange buses that fuelled the illicit drug epidemic in Redfern’s Aboriginal community. This was a bracing street-level confrontation with the addicts and dealers among his own people, as well as a huge ideological and political struggle with the harm minimisation orthodoxy in drug policy. At the time the harm minimisers held the commanding heights and they insisted on their right to facilitate the drug epidemics, even at a genocidal cost to the last original Australian community living in the shadows of this country’s first and greatest city.

I watched the news reports seven and eight years ago and wondered if Mick and his colleagues heard my cheers echoing from Cape York. This was the real fight. This was the fight whose basic motivation had to be a great love for your own people – and a hatred for the drug culture.

This was the real leadership: at the coalface, on the ground, among the people, on the street-corners. Anybody can talk, but can you walk the talk? This question humbles me when I meet community leaders with the courage and fortitude of Mundine. And for those whose memory is like my own of the Redfern of decades ago when I was a student at Sydney University, I could not be more impressed with what they have achieved.

This is what struck me during my visit this week.

First, there is a core of moral leadership in that community. You could see the guiding hand of community matriarch Aunty Millie Ingram and a network of younger leaders working in housing, supporting victims of domestic violence, working to help youth stay clear of the so-called youth justice system, helping men with substance abuse and other histories put their broken lives together and contribute to their families.

Second, they have struck a remarkable partnership between community leaders and the NSW Police, which has resulted in a 70 per cent reduction in street offences in the area. I met the man they say is responsible for the police side of this extraordinarily good development, Commander Luke Freudenstein. He came out of the gym at the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence and the mutual respect between Mundine’s community and this copper was palpable. The Redfern version of community policing should be a model for policing in strife-torn communities such as ours in Cape York.

Third, the direction of federal government policy in recent decades in focusing efforts in regional and remote Aboriginal communities is wrong-headed. There is tremendous need in urban communities, and places like Redfern deserve proper government attention to their aspirations. The great majority of Aboriginal Australians live in urban locations and while there is a sizeable middle class who are doing well on social and economic indicators, there are many communities who are as disadvantaged and as distressed as some of the most parlous remote communities. What is done in urban areas will often need to be different from remote and regional areas, but turning a blind eye to these communities as if they are prospering in the mainstream is wrong.

Fourth, there is a spirit and vibrancy in Redfern that I never expected and I have certainly never detected before. Hope is in the air. My own frame of thinking about the challenges facing our people experienced a severe paradigm shift when the man responsible for developing the Centre for Indigenous Excellence, Jason Glanville, described the underlying philosophy of the amazing precinct created at the site of the old Redfern Public School: let’s move from the head-frame of indigenous disadvantage to indigenous excellence. For someone like me grappling with problems and misery, Glanville’s message was tectonic.

The centrepiece for the renaissance of Redfern is Mundine’s visionary Pemulwuy Project, named after the legendary Aboriginal freedom fighter. This is the Aboriginal Housing Company’s redevelopment proposal for the old Block.

Mundine and his team have come up with a vision for their community. Their project has three precincts centred in and around the old Block, now razed. One precinct includes commercial facilities, including a theatre. Another precinct is proposed to provide student accommodation. And a third will provide low-income accommodation for the Aboriginal community.

I recall thinking at the time when Mundine waged his campaign against the disintegration of his community by drugs, that all of the signs were pointing to the final destruction and dispersal of the Aboriginal community from the inner city of Sydney.

I recall thinking the people of Redfern needed to take charge of their destiny, and articulate a viable future for their people in the ground zero of black Australia.

And this is what Mundine and his colleagues have done. They have not allowed the strong forces of inner-city gentrification dispossess their people from their home community.

Mundine’s plan is one for a new community, founded on an intolerance of drugs and abuse. Founded on responsibility, care, social order, cultural recognition and mutual respect. It was clear from my conversation with him that I have nothing new to tell Mundine about the problems of welfare.

When their development approval came through recently, Premier Barry O’Farrell called Mundine to advise him. This is an important milestone for the Pemulwuy Project.

The development is self-funding, other than in respect of the provision of low-income accommodation for the Aboriginal community. To do this the project needs the support of the federal and NSW governments to underwrite the provision of subsidised accommodation.

It is imperative O’Farrell and his federal counterparts honour the leadership that Mundine and his people have shown in confronting their problems, and in defining a vision for the future that offers harmonious co-existence of the multiple cultures that live in Redfern, and retains its strong Aboriginal cultural identity.

It is said that Harlem is the capital of black America. Redfern is the capital of indigenous Australia, and the renaissance of this community is not an option. It must happen.

Mark Spinks, who chairs the Housing Company, reminded me I had no shortage of critics in Aboriginal politics but he assured me “Even Jesus Christ had his detractors.” Those who want to get a sense of the change Spinks and Mundine are driving in Redfern should join their Anzac Day march in two weeks’ time, honouring indigenous servicemen.

Jesus might have run the money-changers out of the Temple, but Mick Mundine drove the drug dealers from the Block.

Noel Pearson is chair of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.

THERE is no doubt Australia has good schooling systems: we perform well on international tests and generally have high levels of participation and achievement. However, in recent years Australia’s declining academic performance – relative to international peers and absolutely in student performance – has become harder to mistake.

In the 2000 OECD Program for International Student Assessment test results, Australia ranked second in reading and mathematics. In the most recent tests in 2009, Australia trailed 12 countries in mathematics and six in reading. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study test implies even greater cause for concern: in 2011, Australia ranked 27th for reading. The results from these and other internationally administered tests, together with national literacy and numeracy tests, point to the reality that Australia’s school education systems – long among the best performing in the world – have stagnated.

To meet this challenge, we cannot afford to be complacent and content with only above-average results; instead, we must target the causes of poor performance.

In 2007, in response to the long-debated question of why some schools and school reform agendas succeed and some do not, McKinsey & Company studied the world’s best performing school systems. Its report outlined the common features of rapidly improving and highly successful school systems around the world to demonstrate that substantial improvements in student outcomes are possible with the application of three essential practices at the system-level: getting the right teachers in place; getting effective instruction right; and ensuring the system delivers for every student.

Building on this work, in 2010 McKinsey analysed more than 20 education systems at different levels of performance to understand how a school system with poor performance becomes a good system and how one with good performance becomes great. This research found each stage of a school improvement journey – from poor to excellent – is associated with a different cluster of interventions, but a lever common to all stages is to build the instructional skills of teachers.

It is our view that although this research analysed school systems across the world, these findings apply equally within systems to individual schools. Thus, the measures to achieve significant, sustained and widespread gains in student outcomes vary based on a school’s starting point.

Policy-makers often fail to grasp this nuance and frequently latch on to specific reforms as silver bullets to transform the performance of all schools, rather than aligning interventions to target performance levels.

There is no use in all Australian schools blindly following a system such as that in Finland, which is at the excellent end of the spectrum. But there is a section of Australian schools for which Finland provides a very appropriate model. The schools I work with in Cape York Peninsula are at the opposite end of the improvement spectrum from Finland, and the appropriate interventions for our schools are more like Singapore in the 1970s and early 80s – but not Singapore as it is today.

Our ambition to propel Australia into the top tier of schooling systems, in terms of both equity and excellence, requires us to improve the performance of all schools: to move below-benchmark schools to the benchmark and at-benchmark schools beyond the benchmark, and to support above-benchmark schools in maintaining their trajectory. While the overall approach should aim to improve teaching and instructional quality, this will look different for high-performing and low-performing schools. Our reform thinking in Cape York is based on this compelling framework.

For example, levels of school and teacher professional autonomy vary depending on whether your school is on the poor to fair stage of its improvement journey, or on the good to great stage. This staged autonomy model set out by McKinsey means it is as mistaken to give low-performing schools autonomy as it is to restrain high-performing schools by not affording them full professional autonomy. The international evidence tells us the spectrum moves from prescription at the starting end to autonomy at the other.

While we have our share of high-performing schools, Australia’s schooling systems produce uneven outcomes. Students who begin formal education behind their peers and do not catch up in the first years of primary school, never catch up. Indigenous children, children from jobless households and children living in remote areas are much more likely to be illiterate and innumerate than non-indigenous children, children with employed parents and city dwellers. These students are less prepared for school when they commence and typically have a formal education characterised by inexperienced teachers, high teacher turnover, disrupted classrooms and poor instruction.

And because foundational literacy and numeracy skills are the building blocks of academic success, in many ways, rather than alleviating intergenerational disadvantage, our systems only serve to entrench it.

Our top students perform well relative to international peers, but there is a chasm between our best and worst performers. And our worst performers have much poorer achievement than the lowest performing students of the best systems: in reading, the bottom 5 per cent of students in Shanghai, the top-ranked system in 2009, performed at a level 23 months ahead of the bottom 5 per cent of Australian students.

This long tail of educational underachievement is not inevitable. There is much international evidence that a high-performing and highly equitable system is attainable.

The world’s top performing schooling systems have far fewer students at the low end of achievement than Australia: the gap between our top and bottom 5 per cent of students in the 2009 PISA reading tests was one of the greatest of any country with above-average overall performance.

The 2010 McKinsey study found that all school systems successful in achieving sustained improvement within a given performance journey share a common set of characteristics in what they do and how they do it. However, there was substantial variation in how a system implements these interventions with regard to their sequence, timing and rollout, highlighting the importance of a system’s context.

McKinsey’s conclusion on the importance of teaching and instruction quality is consistent with a large body of academic research that finds the influence of teacher effectiveness on student outcomes outweighs the impact of any other school policy. Conservative estimates suggest an Australian student with an effective (75th percentile of effectiveness) teacher will learn in three quarters of a year what would take a full year with a less effective (25th percentile) teacher.

Moreover, the impact of effective teaching is cumulative. Evidence from the US shows students who had an effective teacher three years in a row outperformed students who had an ineffective teacher by 49 percentile points on school assessments.

High-quality instruction is the keystone to educational reform, and should be the central organising principle of any school. Like similar calls before us, we recognise the blame does not lie with individual teachers and advocate for a new approach to improve teacher effectiveness through high-quality and consistent instruction and a coherent, integrated curriculum. By focusing on the method of instruction, we can improve the quality of teaching much faster than improving teacher qualifications.

While there are many necessary reforms to the process of attracting, training and retaining high-calibre candidates and teachers, these are long-term and any benefit – even if implemented today – is likely many years away. We need a scalable model of effective instruction now.

Noel Pearson is chairman of the Cape York Institute for Policy & Leadership.