Dear Marion

I have read your media release (Bilingual
Education) dated June 26 and believe you have made
some very sensible points. I would welcome the
opportunity to discuss them with you.
Alternatively, please discuss this e-mail with
Peter  Toyne, as I know he is arranging to meet
with you.

You point out that the 21-page statement
accompanying your directive of October 14, 2008
has not been released, despite your request, and
contrary to your original intention. As a result,
the cluster of aims you had in mind are now being
overlooked or downplayed. You are concerned that
people are now simply focusing on the reductive
expression 'four hours English'. I believe you are
quite sincere when you express your hope that
worthwhile vernacular languages activities might
take place during afternoon literacy sessions, an
important detail that some of your strident
critics have overlooked. Nonetheless, your
announcement has been interpreted quite literally in
the Department's directive, "Compulsory teaching
in English for the first four hours of each school
day". Its policy is rigid in its insistence on
English only. The reductive phrase you object to
is a perfect summation of that unyielding and
inflexible policy—one that ought to be
rescinded as soon as possible because of the
needless heartbreak it is causing hardworking Transition,
Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 teachers, as well as the
parents, grandparents and others associated with these
threatened bilingual programs. It has lead to ‘language
police’ telling literacy workers, for example,  that they
can’t speak their own language during the morning
as they work because it against the law. What bollocks!

You have apologised for your failure to properly
explain the policy and to consult before
introducing this change. My own view is that it is
gracious of you to make this concession. Your
apology should be accepted and we should all move
on—and I mean all of us, including the
'self-important white people'. :-)

You have also conceded that you may have been
wrong concerning "the contemporary effectiveness
of 'step method' teaching in those critical mass
areas" (i.e., where students are speakers of
Warlpiri, Yolngu Matha, Pitjantjatjara and Tiwi).
Yes, I believe you were wrong, though I agree with you that
the policy you had in mind may well have been more
appropriately targeted at other multilingual or
Kriol-speaking communities. A stronger emphasis on
teaching through English may well be needed there.
You referred to Wugularr as a possible case in
point. However, I am not familiar with that
community or its school, so I won’t comment further.

Please request either a waiver for the bilingual
schools or ask that the absurdly inflexible policy be
withdrawn. By no means, however, would this mean a
return to the status quo.

I have several suggestions that I think could be
profitably discussed and, even better, implemented.
For example:

1. You could endorse the COAG proposal; namely, that there
needs to be a realistic time frame for bringing
the academic achievement of remote Indigenous
students up to par on the national basic skills
tests (NAPLAN). The Closing the Gap Health
initiative was developed by a coalition of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The Prime
Minister now reports once a year to Parliament on
progress towards targets against that 25-year
plan. Why not propose a parallel Closing the Gap
Education initiative, one which is also linked to a
25-year improvement plan?

2. You could ask the current Minister for
Education and Training to provide parliament with
a meaningful and accurate analysis of performance
and attendance data for bilingual and
non-bilingual schools over the 2001-2008 period.
As I mentioned when we met in February, the
document tabled in the legislative assembly on
November 26 is substandard. It conceals half the
statistics. It is based on an invalid sample, and
it breaches MCEETYA protocols by not presenting
NAPLAN results correctly as ranges, accompanied by
95% confidence intervals. Instead it interprets
mean scores misleadingly as a set of points on a
bar graph. The current Education Minister still
seems to think that this ‘evidence’ was rock
solid though, so I will keep pressing for better
comparative data to work with.

3. The government needs to honour binding
agreements with individual school councils. For
example the Wambirrpa (Fish trap) agreement with
Yirrkala was negotiated over several years,
starting in 2001, before being signed in front of
hundreds of people at the Garma Festival in 2006.
Principle 1 in that agreement contractually binds
NT DET to support the two-way learning program for
the next six years at least. The Government needs
to honour that principle, not walk away from it, thereby
leading people to think that it was not negotiating
in good faith with them.

4. We need to diagnose the problem of poor student
results more fairly and I hope more correctly by
pointing out that access-disadvantaged students
contend with a multitude of problems (high rates
of teacher turnover, to name just one). Since only
20% or so of remote NT students attend schools with
bilingual programs, I contend that we should not
immediately think of blaming Indigenous teachers
and the instructional use of their Indigenous
languages for this systemic failure. As reported
in The Age on November 17, 2008 the Chief
Minister does appear to be blaming the victims: "All
of the evidence shows that those students are not
doing well, they need to do better", he said.
Sorry, Chief Minister; this is far too simplistic
and unfair a conclusion. As Independent Member for
Arafura you may wish to remind him of this.

5. You could call for compulsory TESL training for
bush teachers as a condition of their continuing
service and require that assistant teachers obtain
a Certificate in Education Support (Indigenous).
As the late Ken Rowe repeatedly explained, teacher
quality is the number one factor to keep in mind
in any reform effort. Systems intent on reform can
make a difference if they keep this firmly in
mind.

7. You could ask that we continue to follow the
recommendations of the Indigenous Education
Strategic Plan (2006-2009), particularly those
which called for existing bilingual programs to be
strengthened . As the findings of NT evaluations
and previous student assessments show,
step-model bilingual programs do not hinder
the learning of English; they can strengthen it, if
they are well supported.

8. You could call for an alliance of agencies and
professional associations to work with you by
suggesting ways to focus the reform effort. In my
view that would be far more constructive than
focusing on a divisive issue and setting up false
binary oppositions (bilingual vs non bilingual,
scaffolding vs the step program, bilingual vs
English, etc) as one or two NT DET officials are
starting to do, and all at a time when we should
be working with a sense of common cause.

9.You could ask that we look for ways to calibrate
access disadvantage more accurately so that  the
level of support to remote schools can be linked
more explicitly to performance.

10. You could remind all your fellow parliamentarians
that the NT needs to abide by the UN Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Assembly
Resolution 61/295, September 13, 2007). Once it
was signed by the Rudd Government in April 2009
we, as signatories,  thereby agreed to honour these
provisions:

*Article 14*

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to establish
and control their educational systems and
institutions providing education in their own
languages, in a manner appropriate to their
cultural methods of teaching and learning.

2. Indigenous individuals, particularly children,
have the right to all levels and forms of
education of the State without discrimination.

3. States shall, in conjunction with indigenous
peoples, take effective measures, in order for
indigenous individuals, particularly children,
including those living outside their communities,
to have access, when possible, to an education in
their own culture and provided in their own
language and, I can’t resist adding, not just in
the afternoons!

Best wishes,

Brian

---------
(Dr) Brian Devlin
Associate Professor, Bilingual Education & Applied Linguistics,
School of Education
Faculty of Education, Health and Science,
Charles Darwin University
Darwin NT 0909 Australia
Phone: +618 8946 6103
Fax: +618 8946 6151
CRICOS Provider No: 00300K