Joaqlin Estus
ICT
ANCHORAGE — Arctic educators say too many Alaska Native and American Indian students are not well served by Western school systems. The solution lies in self-determination, said panelists speaking at the Arctic Encounter Symposium on March 31 in Anchorage.
As it is now, a fact sheet from the National Congress of American Indians states:
- American Indian and Alaska Native students are less likely to graduate high school or continue to college.
- In 2009, 13 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native 16-24 year olds were not enrolled in high school and have not earned a high school credential, compared to 8 percent of the total population.
- The national graduation rate for American Indian high school students was 50.6 percent in the 2004–05 school year, compared to 77.6 percent for white students.
Diane Hirshberg is director and professor of education policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage.
She shared data showing a high school graduation rate of 64 percent for Alaska Native and American Indian students compared to 78 percent for non-Native Alaskans. And the dropout rate for Alaska Native and American Indian students was 7 percent compared to 4 percent for non-Natives.
Panelists pointed to numerous factors that contribute to the low success rates. Those include high teacher turnover, language barriers, curriculum that doesn’t reflect community values, and a lack of Native role models as teachers and in school administration and other positions. At the college level, success rates are affected by unfamiliarity and culture shock upon entering college, and distance from home communities to attend college.
These are well-known, long-standing issues, said Hirshberg.
“What we have is a broken record of systemic failure,” said Hirshberg. “We need structural, legal, political and social changes. We really need a critical approach, not a metaphorical decolonization, but genuine transfer of oversight allocation of resources of education.”
Edward Alexander, Gwich’in Athabascan, is co-chair of Gwich’in Council International. He’s been a teacher in Alaska for 17 years, and a language and education coordinator for Tanana Chiefs Conference, which represents 42 tribes in Interior Alaska.
He told an audience of about 30 people, “There’s also the failure within the current school system to center the educational goals around Indigenous values, around tribal goals, around the goals of those students who are growing up in those communities, the attainment that they would like to see, the goals that they would like to reach and so forth.
“There’s been a really big disconnect between schools and the populations they’re supposed to serve. That’s a centerpiece of why we need transformation,” he said.
The results are dire, said Alexander. “The impacts, the relationships of school to health, something that’s often not thought about is high suicide rates and the despair of youth serving time essentially in a system that’s not designed for them or for their goals to go forward.”
He said compacting of education in Alaska — with the state formally recognizing a tribal entity’s authority to operate and oversee K-12 schools — would transform education in Alaska. “That’s our goal,” Alexander said. Compacting is being tested now. It will allow communities to set priorities, and to train local people so they can fill important roles in the schools, Alexander said.
Compacting would include recognition of the value of education on the land, the importance of relationships in Indigenous communities, and a system in which schools both belong to and reflect their communities, he said.
The goals of a compacted school differ from those of a state operated system, he said. The schools would become centered around language, community, and family. “They become centered around lifelong learning and active learning educational communities, rather than a place where people go and tolerate for a certain period of time,” Alexander said.
Compacting would provide tribal communities with the funding, the administration, and the teacher training to have student-centered educational approaches, he said.
“The failure is not in our communities. We have a hundred thousand years of success in the North and educating our young people to survive in some of the most difficult places in the world, and do it quite easily and have a good time while we’re doing it. And so that’s the kind of success that we need going forward,” Alexander said.
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