Assessing the year after big changes in Montana’s public school curriculum
Child at Arlee Pow Wow. Photo by Alice Tejkalová.
Prague 2007: Common Ground
According to a 1998 Montana history textbook, “The death of the American Indian culture took less than 30 years after its 9,000 years of building.” Mike Jetty, director of curriculum for the Indian Education Department with Montana’s Office of Public Instruction (OPI), finds a lot to disagree with in that statement.
Not only have Indians lived on the North American continent for longer than 9,000 years, but their varied cultures are still alive, said Jetty. “There was no bad-intention” on the authors’ parts, he said, but the statement is rather an expression of ignorance.
In 1999, the Montana Legislature enacted the Indian Education For All (IEFA) law in order to help dispel such ignorance. IEFA requires that Montana’s public schools teach all students about the unique history and cultural heritage of each of the state’s Tribal Nations.
The first provisions recognizing the need for the educational system to help “preserve” the “cultural integrity” of American Indians appeared in Montana’s Constitution in 1972. Joyce Silverthorne, director of the Tribal Education Department for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said that it was legislators who pushed to introduce Indian studies into the public school system. Legislators were finding that they had to scramble to learn all they needed to know about tribes, reservations and treaty sovereignty between the time they were elected in November, and January when they took office, said Silverthorne. They realized that their educations had not provided them with the knowledge they needed to interact with the state’s tribes.
A Long Wait
It took more then 30 years for IEFA to become a law in 1999, and it wasn’t until 2005 that the public schools and the Office of Public Instruction actually received money to begin implementation of the act. State Superintendent of Schools Linda McCulloch said that they received $3.4 million in 2005 for IEFA and Achievement Gap and she thought that OPI had to make the most of the money while they had it. “I sat everyone down and said,’ you know, people, this is historic that we’ve gotten money, but there will be people, come the next legislative session who will want to get rid of it,’” she said. “You will be under a microscope for every thing you do, for every dime you spend, everything that’s accomplished or not accomplished. So you cannot fail. You have to provide great materials to schools.”
One of the purposes of IEFA is to try to begin generating textbooks and class materials that are written from an American Indian perspective. Now that OPI and the schools have some money for IEFA, Mike Jetty has been working to provide teachers with materials that pertain to Montana’s American Indians for use in their classes. “We used to have this excuse from the schools: ‘well, we don’t know what resources to use.’ So we started developing as many resources as we could and updating the ones we knew were good and getting them out to every school,” he said.
History and social studies are probably the subjects that IEFA lessons could most easily be integrated into, and are arguably the most important. Many textbooks fail to mention some of the most unsavory pieces of history from the American Indians’ encounters with European explorers and settlers. “The history is always written by non-tribal people about themselves moving to the West or whatever and the Indians were generally considered as a part of wilderness,” said Corky Clairmont, professor of Art at Salish Kootenai College. Jetty said that part of the IEFA money has gone to Montana tribes so that they can write their own histories. “All these histories and projects are coming from the tribes themselves saying this is what we want people to know about us,” he said.
In addition to social studies, OPI is working to create and find lessons that incorporate American Indian heritage into other subjects such as: math, music, art and language.
Essential understandings
Jetty also works with public school teachers in professional development to educate them about IEFA and what are referred to as the “Essential Understandings Regarding Montana Indians.” The understandings are statements that highlight the diversity of Indian tribes and the importance of recognizing their unique histories and traditions. OPI provides teachers with lists of books that contain information from an Indian perspective and also gives schools recommendations on what they might do with the IEFA funds they are receiving.
The most frequently asked question Jetty receives from teachers is “What should I call Native Americans?” “Yesterday I was on a tour with my brother from Wisconsin and his family,” he said. “We went to the Gates of the Mountains. The guy kept saying ‘Native American Indians.’ He was covering the whole spectrum, trying to be politically correct.” Jetty encourages teachers to use whatever term they want: Native Americans, American Indians, or First Nations. If it is possible they should be tribal specific if they are not talking about American Indians in general, he said.
Asked whether he feels hopeful about the future of IEFA, Jetty calls himself “cautiously optimistic.” He points to a number of instances that reinforce his view that IEFA is really helping, even in areas where not many American Indians live. Jetty told a story he heard from Norma Bixby, a state representative from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. A Cheyenne woman was picked-up by two non-native boys while hitchhiking near the town of Ekalaka in eastern Montana. The boys asked her if she was Native, and when she told them she was Cheyenne, they began to tell her all about what they had learned in school about her tribe.
Linda McCulloch hopes that IEFA will help to dissolve the racism and discrimination many interviewees had been exposed to. “Hopefully the IEFA should help eradicate the racial aspect of it all,” she said. “If you know people, you don’t tend to slander them as a group.”
Bridging achievement gap
Research done by the U.S. Department of Education in 1999 revealed an astonishing thing. “A lot of Indian students who live in reservation areas start school with a vocabulary about 3,000 words while the mainstream children who are from urban or suburban areas start school with vocabulary about 20,000 words,” says Carmen Taylor, special assistant to both the vice-president for Instructional Services and the president at Salish Kootenai College. Lots of Native American students start to drop out of school. According to the opinion of Joe McDonald, president of SKC, it usually begins around 6th grade. This phenomenon of differences between the educational success of Native and mainstream Americans has started to be called “Achievement Gap.” Both teachers and researchers are trying to find out what causes it and how to solve the problem.
“I don’t know if I have a right answer, but I have a few thoughts about it,” says Taylor. “The first is that parents don’t read to their children as many books at an early age. The second one is that we don’t have as many conversations in a lot of our households.”
Joe McDonald stresses the influence of bad family conditions – alcoholism, drug addiction or even child abuse. Linda McCulloch sees poverty in families as one of the main reasons for the achievement gap. “These kids live in areas that experience 60-80% unemployment. There’s often no reason to go to school because there’s not a job when they graduate,” says McCulloch. There are also no role models in a lot of poor Indian families because parents aren’t well-educated and don’t have jobs. In addition, one needs to take into account grandparents’ bad experiences in boarding schools: “Within reservation families, you have the boarding school aspect. Their grandparents were shuffled-off to boarding school and told to be white,” adds McCulloch.
The achievement gap can manifest itself in many different ways. Students may fall behind because they are not following their lessons and they may drop out altogether. “It also depends on children’s familiarity with things,” explains Taylor. “My friend who is a Navajo told me a story that students had to mark in a test where boats go. There were pictures of a river and highway. And those kids where pretty continually marking the highway because kids see boats on cars on the highway, there’s no river in that region.”
Trying to find a solution for such a complex issue as achievement gap isn’t easy. But a great step may have been made toward improvement this year. “We just passed in this legislature, by a miracle, full-time Kindergarten,” McCulloch says. “We know that if a child can’t read by the end of third grade, it is virtually impossible to ever catch them up.” For the next fall 82 percent of kids are signed up for this full-time Kindergarten. There is also a program within No Child Left Behind called “Reading First.” It should give every teacher good training on how to teach reading.
And, of course, tribal education could help. That’s why an elementary teaching program that starts next fall at Salish Kootenai College is awaited so anxiously. The graduates of the program will know the cultural and social background of their own pupils. “We need to make sure our teachers get professional development in poverty issues. Learning in poverty is very different than learning as a middle class student,” says McCulloch.
Linda McCulloch’s department is exploring everything that is tied to the achievement gap but its funds are limited: “The Achievement Gap is really something that we’re just beginning [to work on]. It has been funded for half a million dollars over the biennium, so it’s not like it’s enough money to go out and do huge projects in schools. But it’s a start. We’ve never had it before. And we may never have it again.”
interesting
Posted by: fred | January 19, 2008 at 04:25 PM