Carpenter’s Aboriginal Literacy Disaster (Part 2)

Carpenter’s failed Aboriginal Literacy Strategy (ALS)

Alan Carpenter's capture by the linguists in Aboriginal Education was highlighted in How Carpenter sent Aboriginal Literacy Backwards. We saw how he fast tracked schools in his own electorate at the expense of impoverished Aboriginal kids Carpenter: My Schools before Fitzroy Crossing School. That’s not corruption or misconduct, that just the spoils of being the Minister for Education.

With no idea of how to address the problem of poor Aboriginal literacy, he introduced more misguided and damaging nonsense. He announced a new Aboriginal Literacy Strategy.

A half-competent literacy teacher could predict this vacuous strategy would fail and compound the problem. Questions were asked in parliament by Barbara Scott MLC. Why weren't phonics, spelling and spelling skills, dictation and dictionary skills, part of the Aboriginal Literacy Strategy?

Well what was the result?

The Aboriginal Literacy Strategy was introduced into 43 remote community schools. The table below shows the appalling results. Remember these Commonwealth WALNA benchmarks are very low and not demanding – students only have to score 19% in some so-called tests to achieve the benchmark - not the 50% you would expect.

% of Students Achieving the WALNA Benchmark
		2004	2005	2006
Grade 3	Reading	67.8	47.8	47.9
Grade 5	Reading	46.5	31.9	42
Grade 7	Reading	16.8	19.1	15.3

The results in the Table for Grade 3 Reading test show 67.4% of Aboriginal kids achieved these pathetically low benchmark in 2004 - before Carpenter’s Aboriginal Literacy Strategy was introduced. Well in 2005 in the first year of his bold new strategy or balls-up the number of Grade 3 kids reaching the reading benchmark collapsed to 47.8% - a 30% drop. That is after Carpenter stepped in to fix the problem. That’s why the Desert Rat calls Alan Carpenter possibly Western Australia's worst Minister for Education ever.

Any competent Minister would ask questions and be demanding answers. No such luck, the following year only 47.9% reached the benchmark – no improvement! Carpenter had done immeasurable harm with this feel-good failed strategy and it still continue to fail Aboriginal children. Remember, Carpenter said teaching Aboriginal English commonly known as “Pigeon” English would fix the problem.

All other Grade 3 tests in writing, spelling and numeracy show no improvement.

The Grade 5 WALNA Reading test showed a drop of 32% in the number of Aboriginal kids reaching the benchmark in 2005 and they were still 10% below the score before Carpenter’s new Aboriginal Literacy Strategy was implemented. In 2006, only 42 % of Grade 5 students achieved the Reading benchmark.

In the Grade 7 Reading test the story is the same with only 15% of students achieving the ridiculously low benchmarks.

The Desert Rat doesn't doubt that Aboriginal affairs is genuinely dear to Alan Carpenter's heart and that he is frustrated - but the tragedy is the tyranny of his good intentions, that he has no idea of the damage that he has done.

That said, the Desert Rat has high hopes and expectations that new CEO Sharyn O’Neill will tackle the problem and bring to account the fluffy authors of this failed strategy. The real danger is that they will metamorphose themselves into a new fix-it program – to which they will not put their name.

Put them back into the classroom Sharyn, like you have done with the discredited regional office "literacy consultants" and give them a reality check. In truth many of these consultants and managers actually hate classroom teaching.

How Carpenter set Aboriginal Literacy backwards. (Part 1)

Virtual Nourishment - Carpenter’s Impoverishment of Aboriginal Literacy

“Indigenous Australians will make more advances in education when Aboriginal English is respected in all classrooms” declared Alan Carpenter the” visionary” Education and Indigenous Affairs Minister in 2002.

WA Worst Ever Education Minister Alan Carpenter also launched the mandatory video “Ways of Being, Ways of Talk” and echoed the usual plaudits of “international recognition” and “trialling” by other states of this program. The Desert Rat wonders why the content in teaching was never the focus.

This announcement was Carpenter’s most significant Indigenous Affairs media release in his 3 years on the bow of the ministerial ship. Unfortunately he had no idea where he or the ship were headed, or what he was really promoting. As usual, on this journey to nowhere, no one had their hand on the tiller.

Since 2002 we have seen none of the promised advances, only a chronic deterioration in Aboriginal literacy.

Who in the Department of Education will put their hand up to claim ownership of this disaster?

What was the PROBLEM?

The WA Department of Education and the then new Minister Carpenter had been captured by a group of linguists from Edith Cowan University who promoted a new way of Aboriginal learning that has been an abject failure. The new Aboriginal literacy and learning program was focussed on feel good processes which had no empirical research basis. Phonics and other traditional methods which had proved successful for 200 years and basic curriculum content were nowhere to be seen.

The Desert Rat senses this educational “movement” (it was not a pedagogy), is gradually being moved sideways into the rubbish bin of educational fads – at an almost unnoticeable rate, so no face will be lost by those responsible for the failure.

Teachers in Aboriginal education have been subject to all sorts of feel-good, heart-warming professional development and proselytising about this method. All sorts of strategy distractions such as promoting “Aboriginal English”, “Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project” and “Solid English” have been espoused as the answer to Aboriginal literacy and drawn teachers away from basic program content and teaching skills. These strategies have been an abysmal failure and yet they still have their advocates in the Department. They culminated in Carpenter’s failed and still terminally ill Aboriginal Literacy Strategy which you will hear more about.

Future posts will show how Alan Carpenter’s gullibility some would say stupidity, has irreparably set back the education of most rural and remote Aboriginal children.