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Noel Pearson blasts cut to school lessons in Aurukun
· Stephen Fitzpatrick
· The Australian
· November 4, 2016
Cape York leader Noel Pearson has launched a blistering attack on the government of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, saying it had destroyed five years of work when it withdrew his teaching method from the troubled town of Aurukun this year.
The school was temporarily closed and the Direct Instruction pedagogical system which his Cape York Academy was running in Aurukun, Hope Vale and Coen was stopped after several violent incidents in the community.
“Aurukun’s best year (academically) was in 2015, when we reached the point of getting over one year’s progress (for individual students) in one year of school,” Mr Pearson told a seminar in Sydney at the Centre for Independent Studies last night.
“But something that was an issue of law and order, of juvenile delinquency and of policing, the Queensland government turned into a question about pedagogy, and we endured three months of hell about Direct Instruction.”
Aurukun elder Phyllis Yunkaporta, the town’s former deputy mayor who was instrumental in helping Mr Pearson import the technique from the US in 2010 in an attempt to turn around poor educational outcomes, made a tearful plea for its return.
“My heart is torn at what has happened,’’ Mrs Yunkaporta said.
“Recently, Anna Palaszczuk came to Aurukun and I pretty much told her, ‘Don’t deprive my children of an education’.
“They’re not telling the truth (about its value) — we are. If Wik children are not going to have an education now, what’s there for them in the future?
“It’s just creating more disengaged youth.”
The forum heard that analysis done by leading educationalist John Hattie of the NAPLAN results of 122 academy students showed that for Years 3 to 5, reading and numeracy growth rates had run at 181 per cent better than the average, and writing at 98 per cent greater.
Mr Pearson said Professor Hattie had described this as “the good news … but the sobering news is that the children have to make three-plus years’ growth in a year to catch up” with their peers nationwide.
The average acceleration rate of academy students at the Aurukun, Coen and Hope Vale campuses since the introduction of Direct Instruction and explicit direct instruction techniques was 18 months in a year.