Abstract
The United States has a long history of providing assimilationist, English-only schooling for American Indian (AI) students that failed to prepare them for higher education. Efforts were made in the 1960s and 1970s by the U.S. government to provide more culturally appropriate schooling and to provide pathways for AI students into higher education; however, with the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, these early efforts faltered as efforts focused on raising student test scores and largely ignored the inputs needed to interest and support AI students in higher education. Unfortunately, the NCLB approach also did little to close the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap. This chapter examines what researchers have found that can improve the chances for AI success in higher education, such as establishing programs like Upward Bound to better prepare AI students for college and implementing culturally based education.
TopFailed Efforts To Improve Ai Schooling
The preceding statistics support the critique of U.S. national and state educational efforts by Diane Ravitch (2020) and others that the school improvement approaches in the United States focusing on annual high stakes testing taken by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Race to the Top efforts of the Obama administration starting in 2009, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 have proved ineffective in their goal of raising student test scores and provided lip service, at best, to culturally appropriate anti-colonial education
Assimilationist, English-only education not only can suppress students’ test scores, it can also increase health problems in Indigenous and recent immigration populations as they forgo a more active life style to become “couch potatoes” and trade traditional foods for the highly processed foods found in most stores and restaurants. The National Research Council found that as immigrant students assimilate into American culture their overall physical and psychological health, on average, deteriorated, and they also became more likely to engage in risky behaviors, including substance abuse, unprotected sex, and delinquency (Hernandez & Charney, 1998). In a study of 152 First Nation (aboriginal) villages in British Columbia, Hallett, Chandler, & Lalonde (2007, p. 396) found that “those bands in which a majority of members reported a conversational knowledge of an Aboriginal language also experienced low to absent youth suicide rates. By contrast, those bands in which less than half of the members reported conversational knowledge suicide rates were six times greater.” The researchers did not have measure of cultural loss, but Native language loss is a good proxy for Native culture loss. An Australian study found:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Immersion Programs: Programs that seek to revitalize Indigenous languages and cultures that are threatened by assimilation.
Upward Bound: A U.S. government funded program to help students whose parents did not go to college have success in college.
Assimilation: Refers to ethnic and racial minorities being asked to give up their Native languages and cultures and to take on the language and culture of the dominant society.
American Indian: The Indigenous people whose ancestors lived in the United States before it was colonized by Europeans.
Culture: The lifeways of a group of people, including their language, religion, customs, dress, foods, etc.
Culturally Based Education/Culturally Responsive Education: Teaching using curriculum and instruction that reflects what students learn in their homes and community.
Indigenous: Refers to the first inhabitants of an area whose lands have been invaded and colonized.