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Every year in Australia, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show Indigenous school students are well behind their non-Indigenous peers. Reducing this disparity is a vital part of Australia's national Closing the Gap policy. ... Using an updated version of our equivalent year levels metric, introduced in Grattan Institute's 2016 report Widening Gaps, we estimate year nine Indigenous students in very remote areas are: five years behind in numeracy six years behind in reading, and seven to eight years behind in writing. In other words, the average year nine Indigenous student in a very remote area scores about the same in NAPLAN reading as the average year three non-Indigenous city student, and significantly lower in writing. But it would be a big mistake to see this only as a problem for isolated outback communities. Most Indigenous students live in cities or regional areas. So, even though learning outcomes are worse in remote and very remote areas, city and regional students account for more than two-thirds of the lost years of learning.

The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance - even an allergy - to taking math and statistics seriously. For decades, the court has struggled with quantitative evidence of all kinds in a wide variety of cases. Sometimes justices ignore this evidence. Sometimes they misinterpret it. And sometimes they cast it aside in order to hold on to more traditional legal arguments. (And, yes, sometimes they also listen to the numbers.) Yet the world itself is becoming more computationally driven, and some of those computations will need to be adjudicated before long. Some major artificial intelligence case will likely come across the court's desk in the next decade, for example. By voicing an unwillingness to engage with data-driven empiricism, justices - and thus the court - are at risk of making decisions without fully grappling with the evidence. This problem was on full display earlier this month, when the Supreme Court heard arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case that will determine the future of partisan gerrymandering - and the contours of American democracy along with it. As my colleague Galen Druke has reported, the case hinges on math: Is there a way to measure a map's partisan bias and to create a standard for when a gerrymandered map infringes on voters' rights?