Manufacturing Failure. To start with, 40% of all native and tribal youth attend failure factories. Failure factories are those schools where students have less than a 60% probability of graduation. Native and tribal youth have the highest dropout rate of any other ethnic/racial group, a rate that is 2-times the national average, with 3 out of every 10 native and tribal students dropping out before graduation.
Schools serve to manufacture this failure for indigenous peoples in the United States. Inappropriate curriculum, inappropriate pedagogy, lack of cultural sensitivity and knowledge, institutional invisibility, and disproportionate identification as special education all serve to push native and tribal youth out of schools. The impact of NCLB on native students is well documented, as is the cultural clash between middle class, white school culture and native/tribal cultures.
Inappropriate curriculum, which ignores the collective history of the United States, treats indigenous peoples as an afterthought, a post-script to European settlers. Inappropriate curriculum fails to include content relevant to all people. Including information about indigenous peoples serves all students, not just native and tribal youth.Everyone benefits when everyone is viewed as valuable.
Inappropriate pedagogy ignores the needs of all learners and fails to present information and skills in ways which connect with all learners. Despite decades of research to the contrary, classrooms remain primarily places where memorization, solitary work, and on-the-spot assessments take priority. All learners benefit from pedagogy which emphasizes group work, understanding, conceptualization of concepts, and time for thinking.
Staff lacking cultural sensitivity and knowledge. Any teacher or principal working in a school that serves native and tribal youth MUST have sensitivity and understanding. It is easy to unwittingly do something which sends a message of unwelcome. However, our schools should be inclusive places, no matter who attends them. Only addressing the curriculum and pedagogy needs of native and tribal youth if they are present on campus serves to diminish the importance of cultural sensitivity and knowledge. All students must be aware of their own prejudices and perceptions, and all schools have the opportunity to act in ways which either teach inclusiveness or teach "otherness."
Institutional invisibility, which exists for many groups in U.S. schools, is exponentially so for native and tribal populations. Because native student populations are often quite small, their statistics fail to capture the attention of the media and educators. When less that 1% of the student population is struggling, and a different 25% of the population is struggling, the 25% gets more attention. When looked at through the lens of families, that tiny percentage equals thousands of lives disrupted, communities left without the resources of youth and energy to continue growing. Every child matters.
Disproportionate Percentage of Special Education. A higher percentage of native and tribal youth are enrolled in special education. Nationwide, 7% of freshman girls and 13% of freshman boys are identified as special education. Compare this to 19% of native/tribal freshman girls, and 27% of native/tribal freshman boys. A whopping 1/5 of all tribal girls, and over 1/4 of all tribal boys are identified as special education! This represents not a failure of tribal youth to learn, but a failure of schools to provide appropriate instruction and content.
Impact of NCLB. NCLB policies were especially tragic for native and tribal youth. In the first six years of NCLB, native & tribal youth stagnated or lost ground in reading and mathematics. They are the only sub-population demonstrating virtually NO improvement on the NAEP tests. Additionally, American Indian and Alaskan native students are the least likely to attend schools that provide AP courses, let alone enroll in AP courses. According to the NIEA's 2005 report on NCLB, “Our children see and order their world very differently from most other children, and, as a result, demonstrate their knowledge in deepening and unique ways….the No Child Left Behind law [rejected] the need to provide culturally competent instruction” (NIEA Preliminary Report on No Child Left Behind in Indian Country, p. 17).
Cultural Conflict in School. The factors of cultural conflict in educational institutions is magnified for native and tribal youth. Their status as an ethnic minority, often high-poverty, with different learning styles, puts them at risk for learned helplessness and prejudiced treatment by teachers and staff. Academically capable students dropout because their needs are not being met. Many more are pushed out when they legitimately protest their treatment in schools. With few advocates to mediate conflicts, students may not see a pathway around these conflicts, and eventually leave their schools.
As with the educational strategies that best serve students learning English as a second language, when we create schools that support and nurture native and tribal youth, we create schools where all students thrive. Meeting the needs of learners most at-risk of failure provides success for every learner, no matter their background.
(For a good place to start in building awareness of the needs of native and tribal learners, in 2010, NIEA published Native Education 101: Basic Facts About American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian Education.)
