American Indian Tribes and NCLB-- Should tribal governments support the law or not?
Born of frustration by Congress over the failure of public
education with poor and minority students, the federal No Child Left Behind
Act (NCLB) is impacting public schools
serving Indian country. Despite the lofty rhetoric and grand promises, the
great white fathers of this law, both Republican and Democrat, have blundered
seriously. Tribal governments should be alarmed at what is
happening to their schools and consider taking action to help protect
them.
On the surface the law seems to make sense and, indeed, it is not all bad. The funds dedicated to the elementary levels and the implementation of technology are dearly needed and the requirement that the success rates of Indian students be publicly reported is a good idea. The goal of decreasing dropouts and increasing graduation rates for Indian students is worthy. Unfortunately, the methodology dictated by the law is fatally flawed. It proposes to avoid the "soft prejudice of low expectations," but only succeeds in making a burdensome assessment system even worse than before. It is a double dose of the very thing that is poisoning the system.
The new law requires a heavy regimen of testing and strict
adherence to teaching methodologies that have been "scientifically
proven." School
curriculum is to be driven by challenging state academic standards that
articulate in detail the skills, knowledge and virtues of the ideal high
school graduate. The only acceptable way to demonstrate success is
through paper and pencil test scores.
Many of the schools failing to make "adequate yearly
progress" early on are serving Indian reservations. Schools are
threatened with heavy sanctions and even dissolution if they fail to make
"adequate yearly progress" toward the 12-year goal of having all
children "succeed" as demonstrated by approximate parity among proficiency
rates of students as determined by test scores. The result is that reservation schools are dramatically
increasing time spent on drills and worksheets in order to prepare for the
tests.
The rhetoric of the new policy recognizes that decades of remediation programs have not worked in either eradicating the achievement gap or decreasing the dropout rate. The NCLB now proposes to close the achievement gap by nipping it in the bud. Thus, the law now declares that all students must reach parity on paper and pencil test scores by the end of the third grade in both reading and math as an inoculation against falling behind and dropping out. Educational researchers have deemed the third grade important because research has pronounced it to be the starting point of the "achievement gap" that steadily widens until students drop out before completing high school.
Third grade test scores are said to be the "great predictor" of who will fail in school. The rationale behind NCLB supposes that, since test scores predict the future, raising them early for young Indian students will raise the number of graduates. However, the framers of this policy have committed an error of logic known as "begging the question" in which the premise subsumes the conclusion. Tribes should challenge the premise. Do test scores predict the future?...or are they themselves part of the cause?
Tribal communities should question the wisdom of applying
heavy pressure to young children (six to eight years old) in order to meet this
arbitrary and peculiar demand. It flies in the face of the common wisdom about
children that they progress at different rates. Even if elementary schools succeed in this dubious
enterprise (as, doubtless, some will) it will have no effect upon the dropout
rate because the problem lies at the other end of the system, the
upper grades.
Ironically, the culprit behind the high drop out rate for Indian students has been staring us in the face all along. The real cause has been (and still is) the boredom generated by the wooden pedagogy prevalent in our nation's middle and high schools. The system itself that has failed to effectively engage students because of a primarily static curriculum driven by sterile, abstract standards and yielding stillborn lesson plans that are administered in six 45-minute chunks beginning daily about 8:30 am Monday through Friday for nine months of the year. It is a gauntlet for most students. If that were not bad enough, there are also the hide-bound requirements of seat-time for credit and the unwarranted supremacy of paper and pencil tests as the most valid and often the only indicator of credit-worthy achievement.
It is a testament to the resiliency of many of the nation's youth in that they fare as well as they have enduring a daily four-hour bombardment of information punctuated at intervals with public rankings through paper and pencil tests. It is also a testament to a great many teachers who, in these adverse conditions eke out small victories wherever they can in the daily grind. Occasionally, some will succeed spectacularly through extraordinary dedication or inspiration, as did Jaime Escalante who became famous for his success with inner-city kids from the barrios of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, these are often Pyrrhic victories for the teacher, purchased with much personal sacrifice and usually against the grain of district policy. Again, the solution to preventing dropouts does not lie in changing third grade test scores but rather in changing middle schools and high schools.
Tribes should also be skeptical about the "scientifically proven" programs and methods that are a new requirement of the law. This will seem counterintuitive to most tribal people working in education today who, having been raised within or hard against the dominant society, find it difficult to argue with scientific fact. Like most of American society, they have come to hold a powerful faith in western science. They subscribe the notion that facts backed by hard scientific evidence bear the most weight. It is a cultural blind spot deeply ingrained in national society to which they have become assimilated. They do not question the presumption that the scientific method can be successfully applied to anything and readily accept the medical model for solving school problems. They are gullible to the illusion of a scalable and quantifiable measure of human learning.
What we must come to recognize is that educational research is not a science at all. The field of educational testing and research rests upon a wobbly set of theories balanced atop some questionable assumptions. Indeed, in this high stakes environment, it has become more akin to sophistry than anything else. There has evolved a multimillion dollar educational testing and research infrastructure at work across the nation studying a problem they may have created in the first place when they first foisted the notion upon the public that the numbers derived from paper and pencil tests were worthy of deep statistical analysis.
The reality is that for any set of numeric values (such as a set of test scores) to be legitimately multiplied or divided, the numbers must be derived from an instrument that uses (at the very least) an interval level mathematical scale. The defining property of such a scale is that every measured point on the scale must be of equal value. The first rule of practical test development is to put the easy questions first. Each test item is unique. Therefore, paper and pencil tests fail as a legitimate scientific measurement tool at the most elemental level. There is no real scale and, thus, there can be no real meaning in differences among average scores of different groups.
If paper and pencil tests are a mathematically legitimate measurement instrument at all, (which is debatable) they are a blunt instrument and it is doubtful that they should be used to define the potential of students (Indian or otherwise) at so early an age as in third grade. The terrible irony may be that the whole effort to reduce the so-called achievement gap is exacerbating the problem it seeks to solve by condemning Indian students to a steady diet of remediation and longer stints of passive learning. The cure, indeed, may be the cause.
There may or may not be a difference in the maturity and development of reservation children at the third grade as a group. Even if this is so, the phenomenon is likely to be on the same order as the supposed difference in maturity rates of girls over boys. Indian children are as innately capable as any others and will learn to read in plenty of time if they are kept engaged. Federal funds for early and elementary education are to be lauded as wise investment but to condemn elementary schools on the basis of paper and pencil test scores is a huge mistake.
Now, with the advent of NCLB, paper and pencil tests have become an end unto themselves. The whole public school system is now enslaved to these quirky, questionable contraptions. Now for the bad news... testing is about to become much harder and more time will be required from students to prepare. Norm-referenced tests have fallen into disrepute because of the increasing public awareness that such tests require, by definition, that half the students be declared to be "below average." Congress has therefore rejected norm-referenced tests as the standard by which schools are to be judged. One might ask that if these tests are flawed, what does it say about the research upon which NCLB is based? Congress has chosen to ignore this question and instead offer up lucrative contracts to develop better tests.
However, test developers are presented with a paradox in that now they must develop paper and pencil tests that are challenging yet that everyone can pass at every level. The new tests will be "criterion referenced" meaning that test items will be simple demonstrations of particular skills that every graduate should be able to do. The logical result of this premise means that students must get all or most of the answers right. This, in turn, means that the tests can only become much harder. The school day will be made bleaker for students who get extra helpings of practice and review. The rank order among ethnic groups is bound to remain the same and more students will fail overall.
Congress is now demanding that almost every program large and small be justified by a proven impact upon test scores. It is an impossible demand but they will doubtless find a host of researchers who will undertake lucrative federal contracts to test the impact of various federally funded programs. This includes Title VII Indian Education programs that are also bound to lose in this proposition. This is not because the programs are not worthy but rather because the measurement instruments are too crude to detect anything but the most slavish and massive devotions of time in drilling to prepare for them. The slim contribution of the1200 under-funded Title VII programs cannot be teased out of test score results generated from the six-hour school day supplemented with massive support from the Title I program.
Having said all this, the fact remains that, as a practical matter, and for the foreseeable future paper and pencil tests are a fact. Parents (Indian and non-Indian alike) will continue to demand to see scores for their children and, perhaps, rightly so. We must, therefore, help local schools put testing in its proper place, which is that of a rough (bordering on crude) indicator of progress and to warrant that the bearer of a diploma has met minimum reading and math skills required for graduation.
We must help local communities understand the limitations of such tests and offer parents other convincing and high value evidence of student progress. The most promising school reform models employ public demonstration of student work as a primary accountability tool for both students and the school. For reasons that will hopefully become apparent, it might be argued that such practice is more congruent with old time tribal values.
The time has come for tribal governments to stand up for their local schools. The state of Nebraska recently rejected NCLB requirements as contravening the state constitution. Tribes should, likewise, seek to give what umbrage they can to local school systems. Since the law declares that local control and flexibility are two of the "pillars" upon which NCLB rests, tribes have a basis to pursue a more reasonable and positive accountability system for their schools. This does not mean that tribes should enter the quagmire of developing their own static curriculum and standards. This only adds to the burden. Rather they should try a different approach allowing their local schools to balance tests scores with formal public demonstrations of student work.
Paper and pencil tests are best understood as a rite of passage into the larger society and we, as tribal people, should treat them accordingly. The only score that really counts is the last one (which stands as a record that a student has met the minimum graduation requirement). Tribes should judge school districts upon raising their graduation rate rather than upon parity among group test score averages which is not only a waste of time, but counterproductive and possibly carcinogenic to a healthy learning environment.
Recently a study conducted by the Washington State Office of Public Instruction issued a study on American Indian dropouts statewide. They coined the term "push outs" to suggest that there is a systemic bias working against Indian students. These assertions must be frustrating to the public school hierarchies that, for the past two decades, have seen the curriculum mushroom with Indian and other minority content to all to no avail. Many educators in general read the report conclusions as veiled accusation that racist attitudes are prevalent among public school staff. While individual or groups may hold strong prejudices, the bias in question here is unintentional and probably unrecognized.
The cultural clash of perspectives on education between Indians and Europeans has dated from early colonial times. While negotiating a treaty at Lancaster, Pennsylvania in June of 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia invited the Six Nations of the Iroquois to send boys to William and Mary College for a proper education. The next day, Conassatego, speaking for the Iroquois declined the offer as follows:
"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges and that the Maintenance of our young Men while with you would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you who are so wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will, therefore, not take it amiss if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it…
"We are however not the less oblig'd by your kind
Offer tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if
the Gentleman from Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take
great care of their Education, teach them all we know and make Men of
them."
In his response, Conassatego may have been expressing a strong cultural bias of tribal peoples toward teaching and learning in a holistic manner through practical, real life work. This bias is, of course, a legitimate perspective and philosophy that is quite at odds with middle and high school practice. If such a cultural bias existed, it is likely to have been deep seeded and powerful enough to explain the progressive disengagement of American Indian students over time as they move through the public school system.
Of course, we are long time distant from Conassatego and there is no way of proving whether or not such a cultural factor is at play today. If it exists, it is entwined deep within the roots of the evolved cultures of modern Indian America. Perhaps there remains a strong resonance within modern Indian communities attuned to these old time values and attitudes toward education. If that is so, the community values might be greatly at odds with the prevalent cultures in middle and high schools.
Sometimes called the "Industrial Model", the system culture demands that skills and content are best taught in a logical, orderly and sequential manner. The notion is that, as a student moves through the system, his or her education is to be assembled and manufactured by a team of experts in math, language arts and science. On the surface, the concept seems to make sense and is not without some legitimate utility. Schools have an obligation to broaden the horizons of the pupils and provide them with an adequate breadth to their education. Indeed, the system has become a machine for plowing through acres of content. The trouble is that the content is too massive and still growing. The school year is a race to get through required content the allotted time. The result is a relentless and steady diet of the cookie cutter lesson plans which fail to truly engage most students.
From a cultural perspective, the great disadvantage to this system is, of course, that the separate and isolated disciplines are most often not clearly related to any sort of "real-life" application. Students must acquire the content of the lessons through abstract lecture, memorization, and drill. Too often, the content learned from this system is lost to the student shortly after the final test. For American Indian students, the system has been devastating by labeling them as poor learners early on and then failing to engage them in middle and high school.
Given the right motivation, Indian students and poor students in general do impressive work. A few years ago, students led a community effort to construct a new house and donate it to a needy family. The effort was a senior high school project in Ronan, Montana on the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Reservation. Title VII Indian Education students in Great Falls, Montana wrote and produced a play about Lewis & Clark from the Indian perspective which has been chosen to be shown as part of the bicentennial celebration. Fourth grade students at Tulalip Elementary School http://www.msvl.k12.wa.us/elementary/tulalip/home.asp) produce animated retellings of tribal stories.
Public schools serving reservation communities are peppered with such stories of powerful learning and teaching but too often there is no way for the system to honor or bestow adequate credit upon such worthy work which if often hard and lengthy. The content and skills students learned while participating in these authentic projects were undoubtedly more deeply understood and long lasting than anything generated in the classroom. Yet, such projects are rarely undertaken because the system is not designed to take advantage of these powerful learning experiences.
Tribes might consider whether or not there is a cultural incongruence between tribal notions of education and their local public school culture. Some will argue that there is evidence, scientific or otherwise of a tribal predilection toward authentic learning, yet it is as plausible an explanation for Indian student failure rates as any of those based upon measurements of third grade test scores. If alive today, how would Conassatego have responded to the No Child Left Behind Act? Perhaps he might have put it this way.
To the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congress of the United
States—
We send our greetings and salutations. We are writing in
regard to your new education law and the impact it is having on our local
schools. The funds are badly
needed and we thank you heartily. However, we also are given to understand that
all our students must now test equally well with all other students. This is a lofty goal and we are
convinced that you mean to do us good by your proposal that we emulate you in
this way. But you who are so wise
must know that different nations still have different conceptions of things and
you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education
happen not to be the same as yours.
We have had much experience of it.
We know that you highly esteem the numbers given to you
by these paper and pencil tests. Your
scientists have studied the numbers deeply and have foreseen a bleak future for
our children. We, on the other
hand, have a cultural tradition of respect for the wisdom of our elders who
tell us differently. Our cultures
also have shaman and other seers who predict the future. But hard experience
has taught us that, as with all things special, few truly have the gift. Some shamans are false and by the same
token, you must realize that not all who claim the title are true scientists.
We counsel you to look more closely at these little men before you bestow such
power upon the numbers they conjure.
Never the less, we understand and support the need for
school accountability. Since local control and flexibility are two of the
pillars of the No Child Left Behind Act, we propose to offer our local schools
an alternative accountability system.
We do not accept that test scores define the potential or truly measure
the growth of our children in any legitimate way. However, we know that the
larger society puts great store in these numbers and we recognize them as a
traditional rite of passage into your society. We will therefore require our schools to adopt
reasonable minimum scores in Reading and Math to earn a diploma. We will not,
however, require absolute minimum scores at each grade level. There is no doubt that our young people
will meet and exceed the graduation testing standard but, as always, we will
get there in our own time and in our own way.
Indeed, graduating "on time" is not important. Our students
will graduate when each is ready to present himself or herself before the
community ready for the work-a-day world or secondary education. This means they may graduate early if
they desire. If some wish to hang on to childhood a little longer, so be it.
When they do graduate, they will be more mature and capable and the school will
have yielded a higher caliber individual.
Our goal at the end of twelve years will be for our schools to have
achieved a 100 percent graduation rate for three consecutive years, and a 95
percent graduation rate for the four years prior to that. We will require a solid accounting of
all students who have been in their care. To accomplish this, we challenge our schools to find a
way to not only keep our children occupied but truly engaged. We council them
to make the work of our youth count for something more than abstract skills
practiced for their own sake. To
the degree feasible, let our young people test themselves in the real world for
it is in this realm where learning is most powerful.
We give our
schools the flexibility to do what they must. In return, we will ask our
schools to initiate high profile public demonstrations of student work so that
the community may judge for itself the accomplishments and worthy deeds of the
children. For our purposes, this will weigh as much or more than test scores in
the overall evaluation of the school system. We hope the institution of such
events will not only help our communities to understand and support their
schools but serve as a method to recognize, honor, and bestow credit upon
student work.
We want them to show us that school is becoming a place
our children want to be. We,
therefore, expect attendance and graduation rates to rise. Adequate yearly progress will be
determined in great part by community acclaim or criticism. In this, we will emulate our own
past when young people earned status through community recognition.
We bid the nations network of 1200 Title VII Indian
Education projects to lead the way in demonstrating how best to motivate Indian
students. They can do this by
fostering local credit-worthy, culturally related, authentic
projects that are chosen by Title VII students and guided by Title VII
staff and parents. They should work together on a statewide basis and act in
concert with tribally based programs to reduce the number of "push outs" from the system. If Title
VII Projects are to be judged, let it not be by test numbers but by the public
demonstration of student work and their ability to elicit powerful engagement
in our students.
To the honorable members of Congress, We thank you again
for the help you send to our schools but we must reject those requirements that
are bad for our children and other children as well. The scientific method has
limitations and should not be applied to all things. Indeed, its misapplication
to the field of education may be hurting public schools across the nation.
The scientific method can be of little value in the effort to improve schools because it is blind to what truly causes success. In every case, there will be a synergy among the people involved. It is a coalescence of common will among a group of individual human beings to do a thing. The phenomenon is ethereal in nature. It cannot be counted or measured. More importantly, it cannot be sparked by the tinkering application of so called variables derived from educational research to the system.
As for testing, schools should return to the tried and true norm-referenced tests for the limited purposes discussed above (as a crude indicator of progress and as proof of basic skills). At first, this may seem antithetical to everything stated above. However, assuming that political reality dictates that there must be a paper and pencil test of some kind, norm-referenced tests have several advantages over the new criterion referenced state tests.
Norm-referenced tests are easier for most students because you can miss many answers and still pass. In fact, norm-referenced tests are constructed so than most people are expected to miss some of the items. While it is true that, by definition, not everyone can pass, most everyone can pass even if schools do nothing to improve. The tests are normed on thousands of people. As a tactical matter, if the minimum score is set at a reasonable level, it is easier for the school as a team to get the few dozen stragglers over the line. A reasonable minimum score that ALL students must pass (even the slightly challenged) might be set at the first standard deviation below the mean, which has been traditionally recognized as a point of statistical significance. If this were the case, seventeen out of every one hundred students would need extra attention.
Secondly, norm-referenced tests have social currency. If a student does well, it is worth money and will open doors for them. The new tests are an unknown quantity being applied to the student population for the first time. If the theory of criterion referenced tests holds true, then there will be little distinction between any of the students who pass since all are expected to do so by definition. While, norm-referenced tests are designed in such a way that most people can pass, it is very difficult to score above a certain point. Those students who do score highly (say two standard deviations above the mean) have accomplished an impressive feat.
Thirdly, norm-referenced tests are cheaper and returning to them would save the taxpayer from a multimillion-dollar boondoggle in these times of shrinking budgets. There is nothing wrong with using a norm-referenced test in the school accountability system if it is used appropriately and counter balanced with strong public demonstrations of student work and formal, juried student portfolio assessments for graduation.
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robey.clark@buffalostonewoman.com