More in the Native American issue from week 4 reflection

Hello All,

Thanks for the comments! Aja, you asked for a couple of details regarding what the school is currently doing...they have set up an after-school program for the Native American students but many of them cannot take advantage of it (school offered a late bus but it puts the kids home around 6pm, long day! And some of them have to get home to care for younger siblings), they have incorporated storytelling into many classroom lessons, even having a representative from the Nation come in to teach the lower school teachers how to effectively "storytell". That rep also spends time in each classroom to oversee the storytelling in action. Since there were no role models in the school, they hired a Native American TA to work fulltime in the lower school while she was in college. After obtaining her degree, she is now a substitute in the lower school and recently took over for one of the 5th grade teachers who went out on maternity leave.

All that being said, the issues remain to some degree. There are several studies that relate to this ongoing problem (Bower, 1993; Dehyle, 1992; Perry, 2002; Tierney, 1992). They have all found that the cultural differences were simply too great to overcome but the majority of these studies were conducted with high school or college students. Also, Schmidtke (2009) conducted a study and found that Native American students were the least likely of all ethnic groups to enter and complete college. That is pretty alarming to me!
So despite the efforts of this particular school I am discussing, they are still plagued with the problem of the NA students not performing up to the academic standards that the school has in place.
Aja, you also mentioned high stakes testing...the school is a private school so they do NOT participate in the whole standardized testing mess. The basic requirements are taken into account but the students are not tested on their grade level ability in any way that gets reported to the state. Each student is individually assessed by the teachers.

So what does all this mean? Of course there are differences in the culture and that needs to be somehow overcome, if possible. There are also differences in the expectations between what they are used to (for the older kids) and what is now expected so the school is trying to get them extra help. I think I said this before but some of the kids feel like their parents decided this and now they're paying the price by having to work extra hard to do the work so there is an issue with this related to attitude.
Here is my disclaimer...I am not a teacher there, only a parent...well, it goes a bit further. My daughter was there for 13 years, just graduated. During that time I was the Parents' Association president and a board trustee. I also spent one day a week reading to a Native American student and doing the occasional math problem her if needed. I met her because I was volunteering there one day a few years back and she just came up and started talking to me. She seemed to be alone and I felt she just needed someone to hang with. We formed a relationship and started having regular conversations about her family life, school, etc. Sometimes when we talk, her other Native American friends joined us and we would just sit and discuss the events of the day. So a lot of this information about how they are feeling comes directly from the students. The board of trustees is quite concerned, sees it as a personal failure on their/our part because we brought these kids here, now we're letting them down. We know they need something but there are so many variables that we keep trying one thing at a time in the hopes that something will begin to work, then we can move on to the other issues plaguing them. It really is frustrating, especially for the teachers because they aren't making any headway.
The one success story is a Native American student who just graduated, got in to a great college, and wants to go to med school. The downside to this (only from the school track record with NA students is concerned because there is no downside to a kid making it into med school one day!) is that this particular student had problems at home at a young age and a family from the school took her in and became her legal guardians. My point being that she left the atmosphere long ago that the remainer of these kids come from now. So does that even count as a success story for the NA students? I don't know. I supposee if we're talking about NA students in general, sure, but if we're talking about kids who currently live on Reservation land, no.