American Indian/Alaska Native Education: Native Students At Risk

The final report of the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force documented that about one-third of Native students never finish high school. The review of research commissioned by the Task Force identified seven school-based reasons why Native students drop out of school:

1. Large schools that present students with an impersonal education
2. The perception that teachers do not care about Native students
3. Passive, "transmission" teaching methods
4. Inappropriate curriculum designed for mainstream America
5. The use of culturally-biased tests and the flunking of Native students
6. Tracking Native students into low achieving classes and groups
7. Lack of Native parent involvement

The most frequent reason Navajo dropouts gave for leaving school was that they were bored. A 1986 study commissioned by the Navajo Tribe found that the top three reasons dropouts gave for leaving school were: 1) bored with school (20.5%), 2) problems with other students (15.5%), and 3) retained in grade due to absenteeism (14.2%). The same study found that 37% of those who planned to drop out of school also reported being bored with school, while 29% planned to drop out because they had flunked classes owing to absenteeism as well as academic failure. Only 8% specifically gave academic failure as a reason (Brandt, 1992).

A number of studies show that dropouts, Indian and non-Indian alike, perceive their teachers as uncaring. In a recent study of Indian dropouts published in the January 1992 issue of the Journal of American Indian Education, Donna Deyhle quotes a Native student:

The way I see it seems like the whites don't want to get involved with the Indians. They think we're bad. We drink. Our families drink. Dirty. Ugly. And the teachers don't want to help us. They say, "Oh, no, there is another Indian asking a question" because they don't understand. So we stop asking questions. By interviewing dropouts and observing classrooms, Deyhle found that Navajo and Ute students did not have the academic language skills, specifically reading, to do the required classroom work, such as reading the textbook and answering the questions at the end of the chapter. This common type of classwork bores students when they have the academic language skills to perform it, but it is especially boring when students must sit quietly at their desks doing nothing because they cannot read well enough to do the assignment.

Typically, the type of extra help this type of student gets in special education and Chapter I remedial classrooms breaks the content down into smaller pieces and allows students more time to complete. This form of instruction can increase student boredom. Also, such remediation takes students out of mathematics, science classes, and other classes, causing them to miss valuable instruction.

Combating Substance Abuse

While research does not indicate that alcohol and drug abuse is a major reason for students dropping out of school, alcohol has long disrupted American Indian societies. Most efforts have not been successful, but a few new approaches show promise. The Alkalai Lake Band in British Columbia developed one such approach. Their focus is a community effort that draws on Indian traditional cultures to combat substance abuse.

In another effort, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana have established a treatment center at Blue Bay. The center operates on the following healing principles:

1. The solution for the problems with alcohol and substance abuse must come from within the communities.
2. We must discover the life-preserving, life-enhancing values of our traditional culture.
3. An ongoing learning process is required.
4. The well-being of the individual is inseparable from the well-being of the community.

Their treatment program promotes peer support for sobriety, helping other tribes, identifying cultural attributes that may promote drug abuse, and optimism. At Chinle High School on the Navajo Nation, students volunteer to take a class where they learn leadership and peer-counseling skills by helping classmates with drug and alcohol problems.

A key element in all of these programs is peer involvement and cooperation, and attitude that, in itself, reflects traditional Native values.

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