Journal of American Indian Education

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURES AND SCHOOL SUCCESS

Jon Reyhner

This article is a response to an earlier Journal of American Indian Education article by Glen Latham advocating an assimilationist approach to improving American Indian education based on a series of visits to Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools. First, the author argues that Latham's 13 recommendations to improve BIA schools are based on an ethnocentric, dominant-culture viewpoint that ignores the history of Indian education, past studies of Indian education, and current research on bilingual and multicultural education. Second, he reviews relevant research that recommends reducing the cultural discontinuity between Indian communities and schools through the utilization of better teaching practices based on Indian and bilingual education research. Third, he describes a successful Indian school at Rock Point, Arizona that refutes Latham's recommendations. Finally, the author shows that the recent work of the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force on Indian education and the White House Conference on Indian Education points to a more culturally pluralistic approach to Indian education than the one Latham advocated.

In the October, 1989, issue of this journal Glen Latham reported his view of the "Thirteen Most Common Needs of American Indian Education in BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] Schools." In this strongly assimilationist article, Latham implicitly viewed the goal of BIA education as making Indians lose their cultural identity and become real Americans by melting into the general population where they can be successful (see Note 1).

Latham's study of BIA education based on a series of 125 classroom observations and 235 interviews (both observations and interviews are of unstated length) lacks both historical and cultural perspective and is inadequate for the sweeping recommendations he makes. Historically, Latham ignores the dismal past history of the assimilationist approach to Indian education that has received repeated criticism from government reports, historians, and Indian people (e.g., Fuchs & Havighurst, 1972; Indian Nations at Risk Task Force, 1991; Meriam, 1928; Reyhner & Eder, 1989; Special Subcommittee on Indian Education, 1969: Task Force Five, 1976). Culturally, Latham ignores the research done from an anthropological perspective on Indian education that documents the negative effects of cultural differences between home and school (e.g., Jacob & Jordan, 1987; King, 1967; Spindler, 1987; Wax, Wax, & Dumont, 1989; Wolcott, 1967). Latham's research is also contradicted by the research on American Indian dropouts reported by Deyhle (1989) and Platero (1986) that points to student boredom, uncaring teachers, and irrelevant curriculum as major factors in Indian students leaving school before they graduate. Educators and policy makers who uncritically accept Latham's recommendations will go against recent positive trends in Indian education. As Lily Wong Fillmore (1991) has written recently, schools cannot break down traditional family values and expect to have success with most students.

If Latham's suggestions for improving BIA schools are accepted and followed, they will only perpetuate the historical failure of Indian education. Latham's vision of Indian Education fits Vine Deloria, Jr.'s description of past European educational efforts in that it

resembles indoctrination more than it does other forms of teaching because it insists on implanting a particular body of knowledge and a specific view of the world which often does not correspond to the life experiences that people have or might be expected to encounter (1990, p. 16).

Nowhere does Latham talk about empowering Indian parents to control the education of their children or about using culturally appropriate teaching methods and materials.

This article comments briefly on Latham's 13 needs and provides an alternate model of improving Indian education that looks at the languages and cultures of ethnic minority families and communities as resources based on bilingual education research (e.g., Cummins, 1989; Delgado-Gaitan & Trueba, 1991; Diaz, Moll & Mehan, 1986; Moll, 1992). Then a successful Navajo school is briefly described that takes a radically different approach to Indian education from the one Latham recommends. Finally, recent Indian educational initiatives that document American Indian interest in improving Indian education while retaining tribal languages and cultures are described.

Latham's Thirteen Needs

Latham's first need was "to increase the academic engagement of students" (p. 2). This need is similar to the effective school movements focus on "time on task," and it begs the question of the quality and interest of the task the students are engaged in. Over 100 years ago Stephen Riggs (1880) reported how difficult it was to teach English to American Indians, but how eager they were to learn to read and write their own language. The "back to the basics," English-only type of education frequently advocated by the assimilationist educators is unlikely to engage the interest of Indian students today any more than it has over the past 200 years. Latham's second need was to "challenge students" academically. Latham does not detail how he would do this other than implying the banning of radios and tape players in class. Indian students will only be challenged if they are given tasks that are intrinsically motivating. However, the whole tone of Latham's article implies that students will be given an education they cannot identify with.

Needs 3, 5, and 6 dealt with special education, which is a problem in Indian schools in the ways Latham describes. However, in commenting on the mis-assignment of Indian students to special education, he ignores the need for bilingual assessment of students referred for special education. In addition, he ignores the need for bilingual special education teachers for Indian students who speak a tribal language. Need 4 expressed concern for better prevocational and vocational training. There is a danger of returning to the old one-half day of vocational training of the boarding schools that provided skills students could seldom use later in life or that would permanently make them a part of an American underclass (Oakes, 1985). Latham fails to spell out what kind of vocational training would provide usable skills for students in what is now a rapidly changing job market.

Need 7 concerned parental involvement. Again, this problem dates back to the days of many large off-reservation boarding schools when parental involvement was actively discouraged. Latham's suggestions actually go against parental involvement since Indian parents want more of their history and culture taught in schools (Fuchs & Havighurst, 1972; Indian Nations at Risk Task Force, 1991). Additionally, Latham suggests not having Indian languages spoken throughout the school (1989, p. 8). During the 1988-89 school year, I worked in a school on the Navajo reservation where many of the students' parents spoke little or no English. How could they ever be involved in a school where they are discouraged from speaking?

Need 8 concerned teacher isolation. As long as Indian education remains a colonial enterprise, teachers of Indian students will remain isolated. Latham thinks "it may be too grand a notion to hope to eliminate the effects of teacher isolation" because he has espoused the old colonial, assimilationist, model of Indian education (1989, p. 6). If one espouses a self-determination, local control, model as at Rock Point Community School on the Navajo Nation (described later in this article), isolationism and high teacher turnover (need 9) become things of the old colonial past. Need 10 concerned "the effectiveness of inservice training." I have no quarrel with this if a substantial portion of the training involves Indian education rather than tying to import various, often disparate, educational practices that have been shown to be effective somewhere with non-Indians. Need 11 concerned student mid-year transfers. Again, schools need to do more to meet the real needs, cultural as well as academic, of Indian students if they want to hang on to them and not have them "vote with their feet."

Need 12 is "the need to provide instruction in English." Latham quotes former Secretary of Education T. H. Bell to the effect that, "regardless of students' cultural and ethnic background, if they are to hope for access to the full range of options available in our society, the language of their education must be English: no other language will suffice" (1989, p. 8). Bell's successor, William Bennett also expected non-English speaking students "to speak, read, and write English as soon as possible" (1986, p. 62). They might as well have been quoting Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz or Commissioner of Indian Affairs J.D.C. Atkins (1887) over 100 years ago. One of the reasons why American Indian education is still failing today is because educators such as Latham are still putting forward failed policies of the past based on inadequate research (see Note 2). They consider a child's native language as a liability to be quickly overcome rather than an asset to be built upon.

Latham warns darkly that if tribes should decide "that English will be taught as a second language, or that the tribal language will be the language of instruction through grades 2 or 3, it must be understood that such a decision has cultural, social, and economic consequences" (1989, pp. 8-9). Yet Collier (1989) in an extensive review of the literature on academic achievement in a second language documents the need for continuing cognitive development in the home language in order to achieve the best academic results with English. Furthermore, Krashen and Biber (1988) identified successful educational programs that use children's home languages in grades K- 12.

Latham contends that only exceptional individual Indians have been able to retain their native languages and also be successful in the White world. However, the work of Cummins (1989) and Collier (1989) indicates the opposite, that exceptional individual Indians throughout history such as Samson Occum and Charles Eastman were successful because of, and not in spite of, their strong grounding in their native language and culture before they took up the White man's education. It has been English-only government policy based on ethnocentric cultural chauvinism that has contributed to the failure of Indian education described in the 1928 Meriam Report, the 1969 Kennedy Report (Special Subcommittee on Indian Education), and the 1988 Report on BIA Education (Office of Indian Education Programs, Bureau of Indian Affairs).

Latham's final need is for better supervision of BIA teachers. This call for uniformity within BIA schools could lead to a loss of local control. The great variation between tribes in terms of language retention, cultures, vocational opportunities, and so forth, would seem to indicate that too much uniformity could have a deadening effect. Previous studies of Indian education such as the Meriam Report have criticized the rigid uniformity found in BIA schools in the past.

An Alternative Approach to Improving American Indian Education

An alternative to the paradigm Latham puts forward to improve the education of minority students, including American Indian students, can be found in the work of Cummins (1989). He found in examining the research on bilingual education that subtractive educational programs, such as the one proposed by Latham, seek to replace native language and culture with the English language and culture, and cause minority students to fail. On the other hand, additive educational programs that teach English language and culture in addition to the native language and culture, create the conditions for students to succeed in their schoolwork. Cummins lists four educational areas that need to be addressed to empower Indian students:

1.     Incorporation of the cultural and linguistic background of the student into the school and its curriculum

2.     Participation of the community in school activities

3.     Use of interactive/experiential teaching methods that emphasize an active role for students

4.     School testing programs that recognize linguistic and cultural differences and that search out student strengths rather than being used to track minority students into special education programs (Cummins, 1989).

Academic competence to understand English in a "context-reduced" situation takes an average of four to seven years to learn (Collier, 1989; Cummins, 1989). Under the old submersion (with no teaching of English as a second language) or new transitional bilingual approaches, Indian students often experience so much failure in school that they tend to give up and drop out, never catching up to their White peers. In maintenance bilingual programs such as Rock Point Community School's English as a second language (ESL) instruction is spread over the entire elementary grades and students are given the time needed to gain context-reduced English language skills.

Of course, many Indian students do not speak their ancestral languages today because of past BIA educational practices and the pressures of the dominant society, however these monolingual English-speaking Indian students usually do little better in school than bilingual Indian students. The value of cultural adaptation of school organization, curriculum, and teaching methodology for monolingual English-speaking ethnic minority children is shown by the Project KEEP research in Hawaii (Jordan, 1984). The research by Leap (1989) and Manuel-Dupont (1989) shows that ancestral tribal languages continue to affect the English spoken by Indian students and that teachers need special training to help these students in school.

Rock Point Community School

Latham's "needs" for American Indian education look backwards to past failed assimilationist, English-only approaches to Indian education. Conversely, Cummins' approach looks forward in the direction pioneered by culturally sensitive teachers, John Collier (Franklin D. Roosevelt's Commissioner of Indian Affairs), and the recent policy of Indian self-determination. An example of a successful 638 (self determination) school is Rock Point Community school. Rock Point shows that the success of bilingual/bicultural education for American Indians is not confined to a few exceptional individual Indian students as Latham claims.

Rock Point Community School is located in the middle of the Navajo Nation in Northeast Arizona. ESL instruction was started at Rock Point in 1960 and bilingual instruction in 1967. In 1972, in order to provide "quality Navajo education through local community control," the community elected a school board which contracted with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, United States Department of the Interior, to operate it as a K-6 elementary school so they could have more control over hiring and curriculum. In 1976, one grade a year was added so that in 1982 the first high school seniors were graduated.

Forty-three percent of Rock Point students entering kindergarten in 1988 were dominant Navajo speakers while only 5% were dominant English speakers. Under the Rock Point bilingual curriculum instituted in 1967, kindergarten students are taught reading in Navajo. In kindergarten, two-thirds of the instruction is in Navajo with the rest of the time spent teaching students oral English. In first, second, and third grade students receive half their instruction in English and half in Navajo. In grades 4 through 12, about 20% of the instruction is in Navajo with the rest in English. By teaching content area subjects in the early grades in Navajo, Rock Point students are not held back in those subjects until they learn English. Concepts learned by students in Navajo are transferable and usable later in either language, and many basic reading skills learned in the Navajo reading program transfer into the English reading program. As much as possible, students at Rock Point are given purposes for their school activities. This is important as in the recent Navajo dropout study, students gave "boredom" as their major reason for quitting school (Platero, 1986).

The policy of the Rock Point Community School Board to hire and train local people has led to a stable teaching staff. In 1989, 21 teachers out of a teaching staff of 50 had worked 10 years or more at Rock Point, and only 1 non-Navajo teacher was employed in the elementary school. These teachers have had admirable success with their students. The 1987-88 school year California Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) results show that Rock Point students continue to do equally well as or better than students in surrounding BIA schools at almost all grade levels in reading, language arts, and math, whereas criterion referenced testing shows they continue to improve their Navajo language skills (Rock Point, 1988). The soundness of the Rock Point Bilingual Program is further supported by its close resemblance to the successful California Spanish-English programs described by Krashen and Biber (1988). They found that successful bilingual programs shared the following characteristics:

1.         High quality subject matter teaching in the first language, without translation.

2.         Development of literacy in the first language.

3.         Comprehensible input in English. Ideally, comprehensible input in English is provided directly by high quality English as a Second language classes, supplemented by comprehensible, or "sheltered" subject matter teaching in English (p. 25).

In addition to test scores, the success of bilingual education at Rock Point is indicated by student attendance rates above 94% for the last eight years and parent conference attendance rates above 80%. Parent involvement at Rock Point is a high priority. Parent activities include quarterly parent-teacher conferences, a yearly general public meeting held in November, an eight-member elected parent advisory committee that formally observes the school several times a year, school sponsored cultural events, and community dinners (Rock Point, 1988). Almost all discussion at school board meetings is in the Navajo language.

Conclusion

Latham's suggestions for BIA education reflect an out-dated assimilationist approach anchored on an inadequate research base rather than a future oriented multicultural, self-determination approach based on historical, anthropological, and educational research. The history of Indian education, the major studies of Indian education, research on bilingual education, and the experience at Rock Point Community School indicate the shortsightedness of Latham's remedies for BIA educational failures. Recent tribal attitudes towards the old assimilationist approach to Indian education can be found in the educational policies of several tribes (e.g., Navajo Division of Education, 1985; Northern Ute Tribal Business Committee, 1985; Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council, 1984).

These tribal policies have been reinforced in 1990 by President Bush signing into law the Native American Languages Act (Title 1 of P.L. 101-477) making it U.S. Government policy to "preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages." The act also recognizes "the right of Indian tribes and other Native American governing bodies to use the Native American languages as a medium of instruction in all schools funded by the Secretary of the Interior."

In 1990 and 1991, the Secretary of Education's Indian Nations at Risk Task Force gathered from around the country testimony from Indian educators and research on Indian education. Based on their findings they formulated 10 national education goals for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Their second goal is to "maintain native languages and cultures: by the year 2000 all schools will offer students the opportunity to maintain and develop their tribal languages and will create a multicultural environment that enhances the many cultures represented in the school" (Indian Nations at Risk). In 1992, the 234 mostly American Indian delegates at the White House Conference on Indian Education adopted resolution 7-1, expressing support for the "strengthening, preservation, and revival of native languages and cultures" (White House Conference on Indian Education).

Clearly, Latham is out of step with both current educational research and the desires of American Indians and Alaska Natives. Following his advice and the advice of other "English-only" advocates will only prolong the long history of American Indian and other minority miseducation in the United States.

Instead of focusing on Latham's illusionary needs of American Indian education, policy makers and educators are better advised to focus on promoting and testing instructional practices that have shown promise for Indian students because the practices allow for cultural variation or reinforce strengths of American Indian cultures. New books (e.g., Reyhner, 1988, in press; Saravia-Shore & Arvizu, 1992) and journal articles (e.g., Pease-Alvarez & Hakuta, 1992; Swisher & Deyhle, 1989) are coming out in increasing numbers in the fields of bilingual and Indian education reporting new research, collecting and synthesizing existing research, and recommending improved classroom practices. They report successful practices that encourage multisensory, active, and culturally sensitive teaching methods and culturally appropriate curriculum. Educators wishing to improve the education of Indian children must go beyond Latham's simplistic needs into the deeper cultural reality of Indian classrooms to begin to understand what must be done to improve American Indian education.

Notes

1.     I would like to thank the Rock Point Community School Board and the school's director, Jimmie C. Begay, for giving me the opportunity to work as the assistant director for academic programs at Rock Point during the 1988-89 school year while I was on leave from Eastern Montana College. Part of this article is based on the author's chapter on Rock Point School in Effective Language Education Practices and Native Language Survival (Reyhner, 1990).

2.     If as Latham contends in his article, use of Indian languages in the early grades holds back Indian students academic performance in English, why do all six of the schools in his Figure 2 show above grade level performance on English language tests in grade 1. Either the native language use is minimal, which I suspect, or native language use does not hold back students as I contend. If the use of native language is minimal, then what is happening to make the scores drop later on? Certainly that drop could not then be blamed on native language use. If native language use is frequent in the lower grades, then that should lower students' English language test scores in the early grades as it does at Rock Point Community School. The English-language benefits of bilingual education only start showing up in the upper grades in bilingual programs that emphasize native language development in the early grades.

Jon Reyhner, Ed.D., is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Eastern Montana College. He has 20 years of experience in Indian education, was a commissioned author for the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force, and is editor of Teaching American Indian Students, forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press.

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