Judith Kleinfeld, G. Williamson McDiarmid, and David Hagstrom

The high drop-out rates of low income minority students has long been a major national concern. Drop-out rates are difficult to measure due to differences among various agencies and school districts in the definition of drop-out, problems in distinguishing students who have dropped out of school from those who have transferred to other educational programs, and problems in distinguishing students who have left school altogether from those who will re-enroll in a GED or some other program and eventually receive a high school diploma (Pallas, 1986; Hammack, 1986; Mann, 1986).

Nonetheless, national estimates of drop-out rates from varying sources have come up with similar estimates. Among 18- and 19-year-old students, "slightly less than three-quarters have completed high school" (Pallas, 1986, p. 4). Drop-out rates were even higher among low income students and ethnic minority students. American Indian and Alaska Native students had higher drop-out rates than any other ethnic minority. According to data from the High School and Beyond study, drop-out of high school sophomores of American Indian and Alaska Native background was about 29 percent in comparison to drop-out rates of 18 percent among Hispanic students, 17 percent among Black students, and 12 percent among Caucasian students (Pallas, 1986).

Astin (1982) similarly reported that Native American students had the highest high school drop-out rate of any ethnic minority. According to his estimates, only 55 percent of American Indians completed high school.

Native students who must leave home to attend school had especially high drop-out rates. Among Navajo children, the annual drop-out rate was estimated at 32 percent (Crawford, 1986). Studies of Inuit students in Canada indicated that 90 percent left before high school graduation (Nash, 1978). Each year almost half of Canadian Inuit students dropped out of major residential schools (Roy-Nicklein, 1986).

During the boarding school era in Alaska, drop-out rates of Indian and Eskimo students were also extremely high. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, most small rural villages did not have local high schools. Indian and Eskimo students who wanted to attend high school had to leave home and attend boarding schools in regional centers or else board with families in larger towns and attend the local public school. In 1972, about 22 percent of the 1724 students who entered boarding programs left that same year (Kleinfeld, McDiarmid, & Hagstrom, 1985). In 1973, about 34 percent of the 1561 students who entered high school left that year. Many students, did not leave school entirely but re-entered different boarding programs later on in a nomadic pattern.

In 1976, Alaska chose an approach to providing a high school education in remote rural villages that was both unusual and entirely unexceptional. Rural students no longer had to attend programs away from home in order to get a high school education. Instead, students could attend high school in their home villages.

The policy shift from boarding high schools to local high schools resulted from a lawsuit Alaska Legal Services filed on behalf of 126 rural communities. The 1976 Agreement of Settlement in Tobeluk v. Lind (previously called the Molly Hootch Case and now officially designated Tobeluk v. Raynolds) has been incorporated into state law. According to state regulations, a school district must provide a local secondary education if the local school committee requested one, if the community had an elementary school program, and if one or more children were available to attend the secondary school (4 AAC 05.040).

In 1976, 110 of the 126 communities included in the original settlement chose to have a high school program. Of the 16 communities that declined the original offer, ten later changed their minds and established local high school programs.

The high costs of constructing these small high schools were borne by the increased state revenues that resulted from the Prudhoe Bay oil discoveries and severance taxes. By 1984, Alaska had spent nearly $143 million on the construction of high schools in small rural villages. In addition to construction costs, the annual cost of education was quite high. In 1984, the state spent a range of $3900-$17,000 per student, depending on remoteness of the high school’s location.

Most Alaska Native students in rural villages now attend small local high schools with enrollments of fewer than 100 students. Indeed, about 60 percent attend high schools of fewer than 40 students. Some students, however, chose to attend a statewide boarding school or to make private arrangements where they live with relatives and attend local public schools.

Most of the small high schools offered a basic academic program (Kleinfeld, McDiarmid and Hagstrom, 1985). Curriculum was limited in specialized areas, such as calculus or physics. Most schools offered instruction appropriate to the rural context and to Native issues. Almost 90 percent of the schools, for example, included instruction on Native political issues such as the Alaska Native Land Claims settlement, and 85 percent taught local economic skills, such as trapping and small engine repair.

The schools also provided a large number of extracurricular activities in response to student and community demand. About 75 percent of the schools fielded basketball teams—a central activity in rural communities. Since the high schools were very small, Native students were not an isolated minority; most students had important roles in school affairs.

As part of a large, descriptive study of the strengths and weaknesses of small village high schools ten years after they were established, we examined dropout rates. We used three different methods of assessing student drop-outs, each with different strengths and weaknesses:

We are well aware that drop-out rates are extremely difficult to assess and that each of these three sources of information has limitations. Principals may not be aware of all students who had dropped out, especially if they had left the community. The census suffers from serious inaccuracies in rural Alaska where census takers are not always well-trained and majority culture definitions of terms may not have been understood. Department of Education statistics on graduation rates during the early 1970s may have underestimated rural high school graduates; some rural students may have graduated from urban schools during the boarding school period and be counted as urban graduates.

Nonetheless, sources of information with different types of limitations point to a common conclusion—that drop-out rates have become quite low among Alaska’s rural Native students but remain high among Alaska’s urban Native students. This conclusion is widely shared among those knowledgeable about rural Alaska education. As an example, at the hearings on "School Drop-out among Indian and Alaska Native Students" held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Northwestern Regional Office, on May 23, 1986, Native educators and others gave testimony on drop-out problems. This testimony emphasized the high drop-out rates and other educational problems of Native students attending urban high schools but pointed to the low drop-out rates in rural high schools.

All three sources of information suggest that drop-out rates were exceptionally low among rural Alaska Eskimo and Indian students:

According to testimony presented at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings on drop-out rates in May, 1986, drop-out rates of Alaska Native students in some urban schools may actually be much higher. Several Native educators argued that the drop-out rate in the urban high schools with which they were familiar approached 50 percent.

In her testimony, Wolcoff (1986) argued that urban drop-out was so high because Native students in urban schools (unlike rural schools) find themselves isolated:

In small rural schools, in contrast, Alaska Native students were the dominant group and established the norms in speech and dress. Academic instruction was geared to their academic background. The small rural high schools share many of the characteristics—small size, personalized atmosphere, individualized instruction tailored to students’ academic background, use of computers and other technological innovations—that research has shown to be characteristic of alternative schools successful in reducing drop-out rates among at-risk students (Education USA, 1986; Seedco, 1987; Hamilton, 1986).

The enormous increase in the number of rural high school graduates was one of the most dramatic effects of Alaska’s small high schools. Critics of the small high schools downplayed the significance of the increased graduation rates. They claimed that the measure of alleged success - the quantity of schooling - says nothing about the quality of schooling a small high school can provide. The issue of the quality of schooling in a small high school is an important issue which we do not address in detail here. Our study found great variation in individual high schools in regard to the strength of their programs (Kleinfeld, McDiarmid, & Hagstrom, 1985).

Nonetheless, downplaying the dramatic increase in Native high school graduates has the effect of ignoring the profound effects of the quantity of schooling on values, attitudes, and behaviors. Inkeles and Smith (1974), for example, reported that the length of schooling had enormous effects on people’s verbal fluency, stock of information, sense of personal efficacy, and participation in community affairs. Within Alaska, rural school board presidents and educators reported that residents who were high school graduates were more knowledgeable about schools, more involved in shaping the educational program, and more ready to help their children with school work (Kleinfeld, McDiarmid, & Hagstrom, 1985).

The greatest effect of small high schools, we suspect, will be on the educational achievement of the next generation of students. Most parents will then be high school graduates, and these parents will be much better able to control the direction of their children’s education.

The shift from boarding schools to small village high schools has dramatically reduced the drop-out rates of rural Alaska Native students. These small high schools, despite their academic limitations, have characteristics similar to alternative schools which have been successful in reducing drop-out among at-risk students--small size, personalized atmosphere, a sense of community, and individualized instruction tailored to students’ academic background. In rural villages, high school graduation has become the norm. The most profound impact of this change in educational attainment levels will be on the next generation of rural Native students.

Astin, A. (1982). Minorities in American higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Crawford, J. (1986, December 3). One-third of Navajos drop out annually, new study finds. Education Week, p. 1.

Education USA (1986, January 6). How can schools practice prevention? p. 4.

Hamilton, S.F. (1986). Raising standards and reducing dropout rates. Teachers College Record, 87 (3), 410-429.

Hammack, F.M. (1986). Large school systems’ dropout reports: An analysis of definitions, procedures, and findings. Teachers College Record, 87 (3), 324-341.

Inkeles, A. & Smith, D.H. (1974). Becoming modern: Individual change in six developing countries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kleinfeld, J.S., McDiarmid, G.W., & Hagstrom, D. (1985). Alaska’s small rural high schools: Are they working? Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska, 1985.

Mann, D. (1986). Can we help dropouts: Thinking about the undoable. Teachers College Record, 87 (3), 307-323.

Nash, L. (1979). A comparative investigation into the value orientations of students at three high schools in the NXT. M.A. Thesis, School of Education, Bishop’s University.

Pallas, A.M. (1986). School dropouts in the United States. Issue Paper. Reprinted from The Condition of Education. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Roy-Nicklein, L. (1986, May). Multicultural education: An attempt to meet the needs of Native students in the Northwest Territories. Master of Arts Dissertation at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Seedco (1987). What To Do About Youth Dropouts? A Summary of Solutions. Washington, D.C.: Hispanic Policy Development Project.

Wolcoff, M. (1986, May 23). Testimony on Alaska Native student drop-outs. Testimony presented to the Alaska Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.