AS Joe Ross sits talking about a program to propel thousands of indigenous students through some of the nation’s best schools, the name Barack Obama comes into conversation.
"Would Obama now be running for the US presidency had he not had access to some of America’s best schools?" he wonders. "What would happen if Obama was an Aboriginal child in Australia?"
Is this where he hopes the program will take Aboriginal children? "Why not?" he says. As he looks into the future, Ross imagines Aboriginal students pouring out of the best schools into law, medicine, commerce, the arts, social sciences, trades and politics. He imagines children of a different dreaming.
Ross is chairman of the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program, which during the past two years has placed 200 Aboriginal students from remote communities into 40 high-achieving private and government schools across the nation in a pilot program set to enter a second phase in which 300 new students every year will be placed in elite schools.
The program is "unashamedly elitist", he says, "if giving an indigenous child the choice to access the best education Australia can offer is elitist".
It envisages an indigenous alumni that may be the foundation for change in Aboriginal communities.
The IYLP is based on the US program A Better Chance, which has sent nearly 12,000 "talented young people of colour" through some of the finest schools during the past 45 years. "It starts with the premise that talent resides in every American community and then puts that talent in the way of opportunity," says Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a Better Chance alumnus. "It’s as simple and powerful as that."
In Australia, Noel Pearson has spoken of the need for Aborigines to be "leveraged into opportunity".
Supporters of the Australian program - and there are many - say the IYLP offers disadvantaged Aboriginal children the opportunity to step on to a new path, one that allows them the scope to dream of a different future for themselves. But it is not without controversy. Boarding school advocates have had to run the gauntlet of concerns that they are fostering another Stolen Generation.
"Wrenching the piccaninnies from their mothers’ bosoms is absolutely not what it’s about," Ross says. "It is about building young leaders and confident role models, a lighthouse beacon for other youngsters."
One of the nation’s most prominent indigenous educators, Chris Sarra, tells Inquirer he believes the program is "highly questionable". Sarra’s criticisms of the program, as social policy, are fundamental.
He argues only a few Aboriginal children will benefit, that scooping the cream from community schools leaves behind "concentrations of delinquency", that the journey through "flash boarding schools" risks permanently alienating Aboriginal children from their communities.
"Private schools suggest they offer a bridge to a brighter future, but it’s an absolute bloody tightrope that they offer," he says. "If kids fall and stumble … there’s no going forward and no going back for them.
"It might give corporate investors a nice warm feeling about themselves, but it’s really only for a sliver of kids and, of that sliver, only a smaller sliver survives.
We’ve got to contemplate ways of delivering quality schooling for the majority of indigenous children in remote schools and this just doesn’t go anywhere near cutting it."
Sarra says that while he is not opposed to Aboriginal children being offered an educational choice, "let’s stop pretending that boarding schools are a panacea, because they’re not". He says governments would get more "bang for their buck" ramping up public school facilities.
Of 10 students from the Queensland communities of Cherbourg and Murgon who recently were given access to a private school in Toowoomba, he says, "only two survived the process". One girl returned home saying she had felt like "the pet Aborigine" at the school.
Against that emotive backdrop, the first serious reports on not just the IYLP but other high-profile indigenous scholarship programs have been completed and the report cards are largely positive.
In the first two years of the IYLP program, 31 students completed Year12, with a retention rate of 93per cent. Most achieved a tertiary entrance score that qualified them for university entrance. All are engaged in a "post-school option (employment, training or further education)". The program also has provided tertiary scholarships for 46 students.
Small numbers, but "an encouraging beginning", Ross says.
In Cape York, Pearson and John Wenitong’s Higher Expectations program has placed 45 students in independent boarding schools, with 13 leaving - many in the initial phase of the program - while Waverley Stanley’s Yalari program has placed 44 students in 12 schools in five states, with seven leaving and 46 to start next year.
As the IYLP gears up for its second phase, in which the number of scholarships will be boosted from 250 to 1000, with 300 new students in high-level schools every year from 2010, Ross is pressing the Rudd Government for a substantial overhaul.
It would include the establishment of a $100 million public-private future fund to lock in the program’s long-term sustainability; the extension of the program to Aboriginal children from poor urban areas as well as children from remote communities, with a selection criteria of academic potential and disadvantage; stronger links between private schools and community schools; and the establishment of transition schools as a bridge from communities to higher education.
Ross says the program so far has picked up only the most obvious candidates and in its next phase needs to push deeper.
Yalari founder Stanley also believes transition schools would help prepare Aboriginal children for the jump to boarding schools. He says there is also a need to identify high-achieving students much earlier, about Year 3, and has been looking closely at the Wii Gaay Project run by the Catholic Schools Office and University of New England in NSW, which aims to identify gifted Aboriginal children.
Stanley, still the only indigenous person to graduate from Toowoomba Grammar, says it is clear that boarding schools will work only for highly motivated students who have the right mix of family and school support and who have "the courage to go away". But he disagrees with Sarra’s concerns about community damage and cultural alienation.
"Why can’t these children go away to the best schools?" Stanley asks. "They’re not going to come back any whiter. If anything, they’ll come back prouder."
Students who left the IYLP program gave reasons including family problems and homesickness, lack of support and communication issues at their school, the absence of vocational education subjects, climate and lifestyle changes, and lack of parental support. Of the seven who have left the Yalari program, three left because of family break-up, two because of homesickness and two because of behavioural problems.
At Higher Expectations, Wenitong says the Cape York program has gone from 6 per cent of students staying in the program in its start-up year, 2004-05, to 49 per cent in three years. He estimates 60 per cent of students are doing well, but that for the other 40 per cent "it’s a struggle for them nonstop to stay that far away from home".
Wenitong agrees with Sarra that some scholarship programs, though not his own, provide little or no support for Aboriginal students, sometimes with damaging consequences. "In a lot of cases the programs are running on desperation and they are setting kids up for failure," Wenitong says.
He says the Higher Expectations selection criteria has been tightened to give weight not just to the students’ academic record but to "their maturity, their attendance at school, their knowledge of mainstream events and their knowledge of what they want to be".
"Not all scholarship programs are like that," Wenitong says.
"Many of the scholarship programs are just grabbing kids. We had that in our first year, where we had kids that in the end we were setting up for failure, and we had to rearrange and adapt our selection criteria, and we are getting to a point where families on the cape wishing to apply really do understand what they are getting into."
Wenitong says there are so many indigenous scholarships that there is competition for students. Is the number of scholarships a good thing? "Absolutely," he says. "Remote indigenous youth have never had such opportunities."
In the nation’s private schools, the commitment to do something about indigenous education is strong, sometimes much stronger than a school’s understanding of the cultural chasm confronting a child from a remote or dysfunctional community.
At Higher Expectations, Wenitong says that of all the schools involved in the program, Immanuel College in Adelaide, a Lutheran college, has been the most impressive. He says he was "moved to tears" when he saw its program in practice.
There are 18 indigenous students at Immanuel, which has had Aboriginal students for the past 50 years, partly as a result of the church’s missionary activities. Some of its students come from communities in the heart of the indigenous badlands.
More than 80 per cent complete Year 12, but only half that number continue to university.
"Quite a number of the students end up going back into their communities and working, or studying part time, and that’s a really important outcome," the school’s director of development Steve Blight says.
"I can think of a number of students who now have significant roles back in their communities."
Asked to nominate a success story, Blight recalls a boy who came to the school from a remote community in the Gibson Desert, "who had never worn shoes and had no understanding of Western culture".
The boy stayed at the school for 2 1/2 years before being called back to his community at 16 to undergo his tribal initiation. He did not return to the school but was stronger for the educational journey, Blight says. Success in that case, he says, was the boy’s "commitment to a life free of inhalants and alcohol and drugs".
Blight says the school emphasises support networks, "very rarely in a structured way", and mentors, among them Port Adelaide coach Mark Williams, an Immanuel old boy whose own children are at the school.
St Joseph’s College in Sydney is the nation’s pacesetter in indigenous scholarships. During the past 10 years, the school has taken 69 Aboriginal students from 33 communities in NSW. It has 43 indigenous students at present and boasts an 88per cent success rate.
According to corporate lawyer and former investment banker Andrew Penfold, who heads the school’s indigenous scholarship program, the students are selected according to need, enthusiasm and the prospect of success in a high-performing school. Penfold says most of the students are struggling academically when they arrive.
Sixty-five per cent of the 17 who have completed the Higher School Certificate in the past five years are at university. During the past two years, Penfold has raised $5million from corporate backers for the school they call St Joey’s.
Penfold says there is plenty of appetite in the private sector to invest in indigenous education, provided schools are able to show good governance, accountability and transparency, but he says it is misguided to think companies will invest in government programs, which are perceived as being inefficient, bureaucratic and process rather than results-driven. "They won’t put money into a black hole," he says.
Penfold is steering a new foundation, the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, that will partner the private sector with boarding schools, initially expanding the capacity of schools already offering scholarships to take more Aboriginal students, particularly more girls.
According to Penfold, the foundation will include a who’s who of corporate Australia and has already been backed by the Catherine Freeman Foundation.
At St Joseph’s, one measure of success is the Craig Ashby story. In 2002 Ashby, a boy from the dust of Walgett, NSW, started school at StJoseph’s. His mother had died when he was two and when, aged 15, he arrived at the college, he could neither read nor write. He described arriving at the college as "like arriving at Hogwarts in Harry Potter".
Four years later he completed his HSC. The next year he completed the first year of his course at the University of Sydney with passes, credits and distinctions. From illiteracy to university in four years.
At Geelong Grammar, director of planning Jon Apted says that while some indigenous scholarship programs are premised on the belief that the students will return to their communities and help to turn them around, "I don’t think we have any right to suggest an indigenous student is going to get an education for the purpose of going back to an indigenous community".
"They have the right to, and it would be nice in the big scheme of things if they did, but in the bigger scheme of things it is better for them to go anywhere that they want to go," Apted says. He talks about raising expectations and aspirations.
Asked what one of Australia’s most respected schools had learned during the past two years of taking Aboriginal students, Apted says: "I think the simple answer to that is that we’re learning all the time and we’re learning very fast. I think it depends on the individual so much … You certainly don’t just drop them in the deep end and hope they survive."
