No (White Australian) Child Left Behind

So it's not just happening here. Now Australians are reeling from the results of standardized testing and simplistic comparisons of urban and rural schools. John Bowden pointed out an article entitled Separatist schooling failure in the NT in today's Australian newspaper, which among other things disses bilingual education. The authors go so far as to suggest that Aboriginal bilingual programs should have followed the lead of places like the Netherlands, where English as a second language has been taught so well that most people speak it fluently. Clue in, guys! English and Dutch are not endangered languages. How can you compare a Dutch/English bilingual program with an English/Aboriginal one?