Julie Cajune is often reminded what it’s like to be an idealistic new teacher. As director of American Indian education for the Ronan Public Schools, located within the Flathead Reservation of Montana, she sees student teachers enter the classroom for the first time determined, as she was, to “create justice.” Each teacher hopes his or her classroom will be a sanctuary where children are protected from low expectations, broken families, and defeatist attitudes.

Cajune still pursues justice. She is a leader in Indian education statewide and 2002 recipient of the Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award. But after years of classroom experience, she now appreciates how complex the task of education reform really is. To serve students, good teachers are essential, but – alas — good teachers are not enough.

The problems many Indian children experience in school — low academic achievement, absenteeism, high drop-out rates — cannot be solved by any one individual. Instead, it requires action by the entire school system and, especially, greater leadership by Indians themselves. Tribes must become partners in the process of school reform and become more involved in the work of their schools.

“Individual teachers can do phenomenal things, but nothing [in education] is going to change systemically… until power is shared,” says Cajune. “There are some teachers who are willing to involve parents and do the right thing and go the extra mile. They can make a difference in their classroom. But you won’t change the whole school environment until that power is shared.”

Challenging the Standards

Most Indian educators would agree. They reject the long-held belief that low academic achievement is always the fault of Indian children. They resent the arrogance and racism that still exists is some schools. They also know that small changes to the curriculum don’t get to the root of the problem.

But what, exactly, should be done? What does it mean to pursue “systemic” reform? How do we start, and how do we know we are succeeding? At the most pragmatic level, how do we gain the support of non-Indian educators and — no less troublesome — how do we overcome indifference and division within our own communities?

There is no one formula for successful reform of Indian education, but we can now start answering some of these questions with a small measure of confidence thanks to the work of educators participating in the National Science Foundation’s decade-old Rural Systemic Initiative. Focusing on regions of “persistent rural poverty,” the NSF supported a diverse range of programs working to promote fundamental change in how math and science education is taught in some of the country’s poorest, most isolated schools.

Funding went to projects from Appalachia to Hawaii and, significantly, included three Indian and Native initiatives. One was located in the Four Corners region; another served 12 tribal college communities in the Northern Plains and the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming; the third encompassed Native Alaska communities. A total of 19 tribal colleges received small planning grants. Funding to the oldest sites began in the early 1990s; most have ended, although a great deal of the work continues through local funding and informal effort.

Most education reform strategies offer Native communities a prepackaged, one-size-fits-all solution: a new curriculum, a new approach to classroom management, or expensive new computer technology. In contrast, the Rural Systemic Initiative encouraged communities to craft their own approaches to school reform, responding to local needs and taking advantage of local resources.

Despite their different approaches to reform, all shared a common definition of success: Rural Systemic Initiative leaders believed a quality education must reflect the values of tribal peoples and must ultimately serve to strengthen whole tribal communities.

“We, as a community, are only as rich, vibrant, and healthy as the poorest member of our community,” says Cajune. The goal of reform is not only higher scores on a math test but also healthier, more hopeful, more empowered communities.

This vision of excellence challenges the assumptions guiding the enormously powerful federal school reform movement. The future of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is not yet clear, but [the law is] already changing what schools teach and how they measure success.

Many states now require children to pass so-called “high stakes” tests before they can advance into the next grade or earn a diploma. Teachers have less authority to shape the curriculum and — despite strong denials from testing advocates — it is abundantly clear that teachers in these states feel enormous pressure to “teach to the test.”

On their own, standards are not bad. Neither is the movement to make schools more accountable. “We’re not opposed to accountability,” says Cajune. “Indian people were so pleased to hear someone talk about accountability.”

For too long, underperforming schools like those found on many Indian reservations, could be ignored or written off simply as a regrettable but inevitable fact of life. In the reform movement these schools simply didn’t count. With standards and accountability, failure is less easily hidden or brushed aside.

But No Child Left Behind is not a panacea to the problems of Indian education, according to most educators involved in the Rural Systemic Initiative (RSI). The goal of NCLB is to create a more uniform, more rigorous curriculum. But without needed academic support, students who perform poorly on tests are at greater risk of giving up and dropping out.

For Indian children, [NCLB is] “literally a push out process,” according to Joyce Silverthorn, tribal education director for the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe and the National Indian Education Association’s 2005 Indian Educator of the Year. The standards movement “is not supportive of [Indian] kids,” she says, because it does not help small, under-resourced schools meet state and federally mandated benchmarks. Nor does it recognize that Indian children — and Native communities — have distinct knowledge and needs.

“Retesting children isn’t going to improve their academic scores,” adds Cajune. “You’re going to get the same result. There’s nothing to significantly address the needs of Indian students.” In this climate of national accountability, she says tribes must take control of their own schools and define, for themselves, strategies for reform.

Creating Culturally based Standards

But in this era of federally imposed mandates, how do Native communities begin the process of culturally based reform? This was the question asked by Rural Systemic Initiative sites nationwide but, perhaps, most urgently by leaders within the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative.

Their project was funded just as the state of Alaska joined the testing bandwagon and was introducing its own high stakes high school graduation exam. All students—from the wealthiest urban districts to the smallest village schools—would be held accountable.

The standards movement was a potential threat to the Native educators. Some worried that Native students would be “buried” under the unstoppable force of academic standards and testing. “The banner was supposed to be ‘standards, not standardization,’” says Alaska RSI co-principal investigator Ray Barnhardt. But “Alaska Natives had little or no involvement in the development of the state standards, so there was a lot of skepticism over what they would be used for.”

But RSI leaders recognized that the standards movement also presented Alaska Natives with an opportunity. Alaska Natives represent 18% of the total state population and, because of high birth rates, they are an even higher percentage of the school population.

As a significant minority in most schools and a clear majority in many rural schools, it was clear that the education reform movement could not succeed in Alaska without addressing the unique needs of Native students. Natives could use their numbers to help guide the standards movement.

Showing how Alaska could achieve high standards through cultural knowledge became the central task of this Rural Systemic Initiative. Building on the knowledge of elders, the Alaska RSI devised a set of culturally based standards describing, in detail, how teachers, parents, elders, board members, and others can promote the integration of cultural knowledge in schools.

For example, teachers are urged to integrate language and cultural immersion experiences wherever possible and utilize “the study of ‘place’ as a basis for the comparative analysis of contemporary social, political, and economic systems.” Elders are encouraged to share their knowledge with children. Board members are reminded of their responsibility to promote traditional knowledge in the governance of their institutions. Collectively, more than 100 specific recommendations are offered.

The cultural standards were an attempt to “co-opt the standards process,” Barnhardt freely admits. Rather than fight standards head on, Alaska’s Native educators helped state education leaders understand that a strong cultural component was necessary for academic excellence. “We couched it in terms of ‘filling the gap,’” says Barnhardt. “State standards are fine as far as they went. But Native people weren’t included when those state standards were developed. Native people look at the state standards and say, well, that’s fine, but that’s just part of an education.”

Since publication in 1998, Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools, along with several companion publications, have had a significant impact among educators and within Alaska’s Native communities. Endorsed by the state board of education, they have helped create new opportunity for the inclusion of culturally based courses in public schools.

All the educators, Native and non-Native, I interviewed were familiar with the standards and could explain how they were being used in their school district. One school reprinted portions of the document in its parent manual; the Juneau school district superintendent distributes copies of the guidelines to all school board candidates. The list of examples is extensive.

This is gratifying to Barnhardt, but he stresses that this support does not reveal the full impact of the standards and the larger RSI effort in his state. More important than the final published document, he says, was the process of developing the standards — a 2-year effort involving elders and community leaders from across the state. For the first time, Native Alaskans were encouraged to create their own vision for education, building on the foundation of Native culture.

These Native scholars helped define approaches to education richer and more complex than anything offered by the public schools. After participating in RSI workshops, for example, Tlingit elder Walter Soboleff returned home and developed a chart identifying all the knowledge, values and resources needed to create a strong Tlingit community.

He included a rich tapestry of skills — food and food preparation, dances, ceremonies, language, among many others. It also required members to share a sense of responsibility to orphans, widows, the elderly, and the sick. It incorporated respect for self, others, the natural world. It recognized the role of organizations, from culture camps to 4-H.

But what about “school” and all that it teaches — reading, writing, math, Western science, history, and geography? It’s there, too, but only as one item among many. “Traditional Subjects — Grade and High School” is its own (rather small) category, as is, off in another corner of the chart, “Computers.” They have a place, but in Soboleff’s vision of education, Western schooling is just one of many categories of knowledge: useful, but, on its own, incomplete.

It is difficult to say how successful this effort ultimately will be in helping students achieve. There already is evidence, however, that the achievement gap between Native and non-Native students in Alaska is starting to close in math performance, based on scores of students in the eighth grade math test.

Looking beyond the box of Western education is the whole purpose of the Alaska effort. Systemic reform means more than a knee-jerk reaction against federal and state mandates or mainstream education in general. Rather it requires a serious and sustained effort to define what education means for a community. This is often the missing piece in the debate over Indian education. Too often, Indian educators focus on the failure of mainstream education but do not offer functional alternatives.

Finding ways to implement this vision is the next challenge. School systems resist change and educators are not used to sharing power with Native peoples. Likewise, many Native communities are not used to taking control of their own education or pursuing the long-term vision that systemic reform requires. “We are our own worst enemies,” says Andy Hope, Alaska RSI’s southeast regional coordinator. “We tear down people who are focusing on leadership.”

Engaging Communities

But when a clear and compelling vision takes root, real change can happen. After 10 years of work, Alaska and many of the systemic reform efforts managed by tribal colleges are making significant progress. The changes are not immediately measured in climbing test scores but in the essential precondition for academic improvement: community engagement in school reform and productive collaboration with local school leaders.

SCHOOL CAN BE FUN: Educational reform could not succeed in Alaska without addressing the unique needs of Native students such as these fourth and fifth graders in Jeanine Griek’s class in Kotlik. Photo by Jan Littlebear, Alaska Statewide Mentoring Project

This is the lesson from the work led by the Salish Kootenai College Rural Systemic Initiative on the Flathead Reservation of Montana. RSI leaders in this community wanted to promote more culturally based curricula and encourage a few commonsense administrative reforms, such as developing a common academic calendar for all schools serving the reservation and approving a cultural leave policy for students who participate in annual Jump Dances.

Yet even these modest goals were, at first, strongly resisted by teachers and school board members. “When the program began, there was a lot of turmoil on the reservation,” says RSI director Roger McClure. His predecessor “had a tough job because he had to go out and change attitudes in the schools,” McClure says. “There was a defensive posture between the tribes and the non-Indian population, which included the school districts.”

How defensive? Regina Sievert, a former teacher at the tribal high school who now directs the Leadership Development for Master Teachers Project at the college, says school boards were nearly inaccessible. “If we went to them 10 years ago, they would have shut the door on us.”

Teachers, too, resisted proposals for curriculum reform. They believed any attempt to introduce a more culturally-grounded curriculum would anger administrators and non-Indian parents. The feeling was, “I’d have my superintendent and my principal breathing down my neck if I tried to teach in a more culturally competent manner,” she says.

No longer. Today, Sievert says the same teachers are leaders in the RSI effort and have created dozens of new units and even entirely new courses that integrate cultural knowledge and tribal resources into the schools. School boards remain a challenge, but doors are no longer shut. There is general acceptance that the tribe, through the college’s leadership, has a legitimate role to play in promoting school reform across the region.

“Salish Kootenai College is providing an important service,” says elementary school principal Steve York. “They are respected for that. They should have a leadership role on the reservation and they are stepping up to the plate.”

What happened between then and today was an incremental process of relationship-building between the tribe and the school system. Salish Kootenai College didn’t make demands; instead it offered services. Like many other RSI sites around the country, it developed a rich library of resource material — standards-based curricula, science kits, and an inflatable planetarium for free used by teachers. Equally important, it sponsored professional development training and created a monthly gathering of teachers, where, in turn, many of classroom-based reforms were first conceived.

Not every goal has been accomplished. While a cultural leave policy is now in place, school districts still won’t agree on a common calendar. Not every teacher embraces the value of culturally-centered learning. But no one would have predicted how much attitudes would change. This, all agree, is a sign of real progress and offers hope for the future. And, of course, the achievement gap remains. In the short term, the achievement gap will not be eliminated by any one program — even a good program like RSI.

In the end, the national goal of academic “excellence” cannot be imposed. Instead, real and lasting school reform begins when communities define, for themselves, the purpose of education and become more involved in the process of education. Tribes are not helpless and need not be victims of inequitable education policies or ham-handed federal initiatives.

“We have resources to draw on,” says Joyce Silverthorn. “We have incredible human resources.” Finding these resources and using them to achieve their own goals is what the Rural Systemic Initiative was all about.

For 20 years Paul Boyer has written about school reform and Indian education. He is founding editor of the Tribal College Journal and author of two reports on the tribal college movement for the Carnegie Foundation. He wrote a report for the National Science Foundation that examined the impact of the Rural Systemic Initiative nationwide, which was scheduled to be released in spring 2006. For more information, see the Resource Guide in this issue. To download information about the Alaska Cultural Standards & Guidelines, see http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/publications/