Judith, thanks for your post. The concept of treating all equally is exceedingly important, especially for advancing a merit-based society like ours. The trouble is that we have to start on a equal footing for freedom, non-interference, choice and measurable achievement to follow. Much as your commitment to these values is commendable, the fact is that by living in a non-metropolitan part of Australia, none of the kids who school there, whether black or white, and notwithstanding your evident contentment with the educational outomes of the school in question, really figure if they are to be compared with their city-based peers.

Check the 'My School' Website for this and you will find that while non-Indigenous students register better results than Indigenous students both groups lag considerably behind metropolitian schools, especially those where the majority of students come from high socio-economic or high earning households.

The statistical correlations on this are well nigh incontrovertible, so while I appreciate and value your use of anecdotal data, the problem to which Professor Brennan alludes is bigger and more analytically complex than that of the particular, successful and evidently highly resilient and responsible Aboriginal family that you cite in your story.

Marie Brennan's plea is accordingly for Gonski, who agrees with her research (conducted and endorsed by both public and private sector schools) to be operationalised rather than put on the back-burner as the government appears to have done as of last Monday.

Moreover, not only does Gonski's data show that Indigenous students are at the bottom of the proverbial pile but that rural and remote students of any ethnicity lag behind their urban equivalents in school outcomes.

Marie's argument therefore is not to persuade the government that it is on the wrong path but that we cannot as a nation allow the basic remedies we need to put into place to be delayed for fear of exacerbating the inequalities and lack of achievement that some Australian kids regularly and repeatedly register over others in the same peer group.

Indeed, in some parts of Australia, NAPLAN results, which are easily accessed through the internet, show that in many rural and remote parts of Australia the majority of students graduate with a reading age six years lower than that of the most privileged and best resourced urban students.

So while your view is not to be disrespected it only matters if you are prepared to compare and substantiate it within a wider and more global context. In other words while you and the Aboriginal grandmother whom you quote are desirably proud of your children's performance, you may well find that if you compare it within a more objective comparative framework of school performance, your view may not hold up against the overall comparative Australian and global performance results table.

Nothing in this analysis is intended to humiliate or condescend to rural and Indigenous parents, but it would be irresponsible to pretend that all's well in a country where some kids pick up the glittering prizes in terms of jobs and life chances, including life expectancy, while others, especially Indigenous Australians, don't register at all on this front and die on average twenty years younger than the rest of us.

I can't disagree with your sentiments, Judith; though I don't follow their connection with John Zigar's 'out-of-left-field' salvo in favour of government non-interference and a supposed equal playing-field in regard to righting the wrongs against Indigenous persons (which I have contested with verifiable evidence).

To refresh our memories, Marie Brennan wrote as follows:

"We know there are strong links between low achievement and socio-economic positioning and a growing gap in achievement between those achieving highly and those at the bottom of the scale. But Indigenous students lose out on both counts: they are over-represented in the bottom quartile of achievement and there is a growing distance between their achievement and those at the top."

You then offered no more than anecdotal evidence to the contrary, without citing the name of the Indigenous Grandmother in question or the school and state to which you belong, as if this by itself demolishes Marie's point and upholds John's. I appreciate and do not contest the passion with which you hold your opinion, but to convince others of it requires the expression of more than an act of faith as well as an appeal to proven statistics rather than reference to an unidentifiable My School result!

Next, you introduce a discourse on greed that no one can disagree with but which is riddled with the kind of cliches that dont show how John might be right and Marie wrong.

I hate subjecting your opinions to scrutiny, but that is all we have to go on in this blog, and it sounds at best like a bit of blah, if not also a wriggle out of a difficult position, stubbornly held and without regard both to the rules of evidence as well as logic.

I'm sure that there are plenty of conservatives who would support you. However, their case, like yours so far, rests essentially on assertion rather than reason. Ordinarily I wouldn't give a fig about this, but where social justice for the least among us is at stake I'm afraid that Indigeous people deserve better than what you have to offer.

The government has made a case out of Gonski for economic reform, while Professor Brennan essentially shows that what's most missing is the increased dollar investment to create compensatory and redistributive justice for those at the bottom of the pile. (The subdiscipline of education policy sociology, which best analyses what the government intends, is available from the work of Professor Stephen Ball of the University of Oxford Institute of Education).

Moreover, Brennan's argument is in keeping with several other critiques of the government's response to Gonski in The Conversation, such as that of Professor Richard Teese, whose supplementary research was commissioned and cited by Gonski. I hope it registers with the Prime Minister and we see some immediate changes, rather than having to wait until 2025 for them.