No, Minister

It's months since I've posted.
Christmas intervened and then it got harder and harder to sit down and write something.
But I'm back!

The state of education has hit the news recently; more specifically the low levels of literacy and numeracy recorded in the Northern Territory as compared with other States and Territories.
We know we don't perform as well because the national benchmarking Multilevel Assessment Program tests (the MAP tests) say so.
What the MAP tests actually show is that the performance in urban and regional schools compares favourably with Down South.
It's the remote schools in Aboriginal communities, however, that show very poor returns: in some cases only around 30 per cent of kids actually perform at benchmark level.
And that's a terrific opportunity for talkback radio to get into the whys and wherefores.
So they wheel out the Minister for Education for an explanation.
A practised politician, he has no difficulty - nor hesitation - in fluently repeating the advice his Department has given him.
Kids in remote Aboriginal schools don't perform as well because they don't attend school.
All we have to do is attend regularly and everything will be hunky-dory.
Right.
The reality is a bit more complex than that.
What we're talking about - remote schooling - is still essentially a colonialist enterprise.
It's a valiant attempt to impart Western values and styles of knowledge that blithely ignores the complexities of working across languages and cultures.
In this context, it's not simply enough to provide schools and teachers and expect kids will automatically turn up.
You have to give them a reason for being there.
You have to bend your pedagogy and then your curriculum to accommodate cross-cultural, multilingual contexts, such as schools where kids may speak up to five languages and may speak Aboriginal English or Kriol as a sixth, but they don't speak, read or write a more formal English.
You have to make sure your teachers are fully trained, sensitive and mature enough to meet the demands; not simply recruit warm bodies to front a classroom and emerge at the end of the day more or less sane.
You have to work out the conditions that are necessary to keep teachers out bush, so that you've got continuity in people and programs.
And you have to have consistent and sustained support from your department.
Blaming kids can't hide the fact that the department is doing none of the above.
But it's what many people in the Territory want to hear.
It's yet more 'proof' that blackfellas are to lazy to get off their arses and make sure their kids go to school so they can get the benefits that we're supposedly offering.
That the assertion doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny doesn't stop the department running the line.
Fortunately, I was interviewed as a representative of the school councils' combined organisation and I got a good response to my suggestion that we needed to look at our own performance - as I've listed above - before we start blaming kids for their failure to perform at level.
I was followed by a senior bureaucrat who stuck to the line, which by then had become slightly modified to: 'well kids who do attend school have no problems with their literacy'.
No, Minister, this simply ain't good enough.
Aboriginal kids are the fastest-growing cohort in our schools and unless we tailor the system to meet their complex needs, they're missing out.
Dealing with this is not just a matter of equity.
It ought to be, to use a classic piece of modern bureaucratic cant, 'core business'.