Across Indian Country, studentsÂ’ English skills trail peers (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Across Indian Country, students’ English skills trail peers

By JOHN MILLER - Associated Press Writer - 11/26/05
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/11/26/montana/c08112605_01.txt

FORT HALL, Idaho - One of Michele Hernandez’s earliest memories from
1960s southern Idaho is calling across the playground to a kindergarten
classmate.

Suddenly, a teacher pulled her inside the schoolhouse by the arm and
washed her mouth out with soap.

The punishment wasn’t for profanity.

It was for speaking Shoshone, her grandmother’s language.

I was living in two worlds,’’ said Hernandez, now a tutor at IT Stoddard
Elementary in Blackfoot. You always had to keep a look out for the other
side, depending on who was looking.’’

Her job today: She helps teach English to American Indian youngsters
classified by Idaho as Limited English Proficient,’’ or LEP.

While students are no longer punished for speaking their native tongues,
English in Indian Country remains sensitive, because Native American
students continue to trail white peers in language skills, records from
several states show.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, many schools with large Indian
populations, could eventually be forced to take radical steps if the
achievement gap doesn’t narrow, including transporting students to
higher-performing schools or painful re-organizations.

It certainly has directed attention to the problem, which has existed
for a long, long time,’’ said Jon Reyhner, a professor at Northern
Arizona University and Indian literacy expert. Indian kids come in to
school behind, in terms of vocabulary.’’

According to a 2005 Mississippi State University report, rural American
Indian and Alaska Native children were the least likely of major ethnic
sub-groups in rural America to be proficient at letter recognition upon
kindergarten entry.

State education records from Idaho, Montana and nearby North Dakota show
Native American children trail virtually every other category of
students in meeting No Child Left Behind targets.

For instance, among North Dakota 8th graders, just 39.9 percent of
Indians were reading at grade level, compared with 75 percent of white
students, according to 2003-2004 figures.

In Montana, 22 percent of students at the Crow Agency public school on
the Crow Indian Reservation read at grade level. Across the state,
Native Americans from 17 different Indian language backgrounds account
for 11 percent of the public school population  and 90 percent of its
6,952 LEP students.

The average Indian child starts school with a vocabulary of about 3,000
words,’’ said Joe Lamson, a spokesman for the Montana Office of Public
Instruction in Helena. The average white student starts with a
vocabulary of 15,000.’’

Children raised in Indian country may also learn a different dialect of
English, one that includes native words. Chris Loether, an anthropology
professor at Idaho State University in Pocatello, said many Fort
Hall-area residents speak what they call Red English.’’

They’ve got this dialect, which to them is an identity marker,’’ Loether
said. And it gets stronger as they get older.’’

There were 592 Indian children in Idaho’s $8 million LEP program last
year. In public schools in Indian communities, including Fort Hall
Elementary and IT Stoddard, are already facing No Child Left Behind
sanctions, according to Idaho Department of Education records.

Deep poverty is major reason that Indian children struggle with their
English skills, experts say.

At Fort Hall, for instance, reservation unemployment is at 37 percent 
more than seven times the state average. Montana reservation
unemployment averages as much as 70 percent, according to state
officials.

You look at what’s available in the home: computers, reading materials,
storybooks,’’ said Harold Ott, superintendent of the Lapwai School
District, located near the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in
north-central Idaho. For families in poverty, there are fewer of those
kinds of opportunities available.’’

As dimensions of the achievement gap have emerged following No Child
Left Behind’s passage in 2001, Indian leaders say they have mixed
feelings about the education reforms: They’re pleased schools must pay
attention to the issue, but fear the law may be ill-suited to address
educational shortcomings among Native Americans.

At the National Congress of American Indians in Tulsa, Okla., on Oct.
31, tribal leaders condemned the act as a one-size-fits-all’’ approach
that doesn’t address indigenous people’s cultural and linguistic
traditions.

I don’t think the philosophical model of this current legislation is
consistent with education programs that work with Native Americans,’’
said Mari Rasmussen, head of North Dakota’s bilingual and language
acquisition.

Still, some Indians are optimistic about a new plan announced last
Friday by U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to allow up to 10
states to measure not just how students are performing, but how that
performance is changing over time.

Gains have been made by our students, but we were coming from so far
behind,’’ said Lillian Sparks, director of the National Indian
Education Association in Washington, D.C.

The aim, say Indians who for decades starting in the late 19th century
were shipped by the U.S. government to boarding schools to make them
more American,’’ is a system that helps Indians boost their English 
without sacrificing their native heritage.

In Fort Hall, Michele Hernandez knows the consequences if such a system
is missing: Today, she cannot speak Shoshone, the language she was once
punished for using on the playground.

Growing up in the 1960s, everybody was supposed to be transformed into
being white,’’ Hernadez said. We had do everything they did, and our
language was not the thing that was supposed to be spoken in the
school.’’