Another NAPLAN release. Another round of headlines telling the country that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are, once again, 'lagging behind'.
We're tired of writing that sentence, and we're more tired of reading it - because it's the wrong sentence, and it has been the wrong sentence for eighteen years. Since 2008, NAPLAN results have been used to tell the same 'gap' story, picked up and repeated as 'news', problematising students over other factors that contribute to student success like the education system itself. If we turn to Bacchi we ask, "what's the problem represented to be?"
We know Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are competent knowledge producers. That fact shouldn't need repeating every time NAPLAN results are released, but the deficit reporting keeps making it necessary.
NAPLAN was never designed to capture Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students' knowledges and strengths. Many students we know speak more than one language and expertly code-switch between Standard Australian English (SAE), Aboriginal English and their own language - skills invisible to standardised testing. Nor does it credit the agency, independence and sense of responsibility so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students bring to and lead within their classroom.
The settler-colonial education system in this country is working exactly as it was designed. In Western Australia, the 1840 Perth Native School trained Aboriginal children in domestic labour, and it wasn't until the mid-1900s that entry was allowed into mainstream schooling; yet the system itself was never questioned, and low expectations of Aboriginal students have remained ever since. NAPLAN doesn't measure a level playing field. It measures how far a colonial curriculum, a colonial testing regime and, too often, a colonial teacher workforce have kept Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at the margins while maintaining the educational project of assimilation as a key indicator of success.
There's a bigger question buried under all of this: why are we still measuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students against a non-Indigenous 'norm' at all? Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles assert our right to control how data about us is collected, structured and used, so that it reflects our priorities and our definitions of success, not a settler benchmark we never agreed to.
Researcher Maggie Walter calls the alternative the "Indigenous data paradox" - an oversupply of data that neither meets our needs nor recognises our strengths, because it's built from the ground up to find us deficient against someone else's norm.
NAPLAN is that paradox in action and it is used as a government mechanism to defend 'what works'. The narrow version of 'what works' according to 'evidence-based practice' ignores the importance of context, children's lived experiences and knowledges.
The 'what works' ideology in the context of NAPLAN results of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students must be examined. What works for who? When? What are the benefits? At what cost is 'success' achieved? And how do we know this?
As researcher Robert Hattam says, "what works doesn't mean 'what works' for everyone". It means "worked for the version of the child, the classroom and the community that survived the purification process".
We know what actually works, because one of us has taught it. In a Year 4/5 classroom in Perth, an eight-week unit built around Noongar fish traps put Aboriginal knowledge-holders forward as the authors, had students researching their own families' fishing practices, and taught mathematics and science as knowledge systems thousands of years old rather than content to be delivered. Students were engaged in literary practices that not only developed the use and application of SAE conventions, but fostered joy in learning. It produced exactly the shift in confidence, pride and engagement that policymakers claim they can't find another way to achieve. That's not an enrichment activity bolted onto 'real' literacy and numeracy teaching. That is rigorous teaching, built on what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students already know instead of what we supposedly lack.
And yet we see the current push toward scripted Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) as the 'national fix' and marketed as 'the science of learning'. There is little proof that programmatic interventions, including EDI, make a difference by themselves, particularly when they follow a non-relational script dictated by government. EDI cannot happen in isolation. We know that practices that are relational, negotiated and built with community get results a script never will.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (see Lester Irabinna Rigney and Robert Hattam) and the MELLE Framework (see Helen Adams) are two examples that recognise the need for high-quality instruction, combined with children's funds of knowledge and critical resources.
We are at a crisis. We've got the theory and lived experiences - how we frame what happens next matters. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are not behind. They have, we have, always have been capable, knowledgeable and navigating a system doing exactly what it was built to do. The next report should measure that system.
Renae Isaacs-Guthridge is a Noongar and Yamatji Yorga with connections across Countries, including Wadandi Boodja. She is an Academic and currently completing a PhD titled Aboriginal student transition to university: A strengths-based approach.
Dr Mikayla King is a Kalkadoon woman, born on Whadjuk Country. She is an academic and recently completed her PhD titled Affective Awareness and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: An Ethnography of Teacher Researchers in Superdiverse Australian Classrooms
