THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION
I’m not so sure about Adrian Piccoli’s take on cultural differences within our schools as an explanation for those students who are excelling and those who aren’t. Mr Piccoli reckons that NAPLAN results and international PISA rankings indicate that Oz students from non-English speaking backgrounds are outperforming WASP-like scholars. He ‘value-adds’ to this observation by suggesting that Asian- and S.E. Asian-background citizens place huge importance on academic achievement while the thong and T-shirt brigades worship more around sports’ arenas than anywhere near a 21st century classroom. The latter’s profile, Piccoli continues, has been underwritten by two decades of unfettered economic growth which, in turn, has led to a corresponding ‘cultural complacency’. The higher than average representation of non-English speaking background (NESB) students in the upper bands of NAPLAN literacy and numeracy attainments is nothing new. In the three decades of Basic Skills and NAPL...