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Bobby
Ann Starnes says
she and Rocky Boy’s teachers know the tests don’t
reflect the bright, fun children they know and love.
Starnes, who
earned a doctorate from Harvard and briefly taught elementary school at Rocky
Boy’s, says the tests are culturally irrelevant for American Indian students,
and they don’t use learning styles proven to work best for them. She recently
started a nonprofit organization in Helena to help all Montana teachers teach
Indian education in keeping with state law.
“This
is something the research is very clear on,” says Starnes. “Test
scores may go up as a result of [No Child Left Behind] programs, but in the long
run, no child will sustain any gains. Native American learning styles are
different. Research shows that they grasp the big picture first and then
get smaller.”
But the research
backed by the Bush Administration is what school administrators must work with
now. The pressure is on for administrators, especially at reservation schools,
where all school funding comes from the state and federal governments, often
in the form of performance-based grants, as opposed to property taxes and bonds.
Rocky Boy’s
staff makes sure students and parents know the importance of these tests. More
than funding is at stake.
“We
don’t want our kids to be considered failures,” explains Voyd St.
Pierre, principal of the junior and senior high schools, who grew up on the reservation.
“It’s
unfortunate we were judged on just one test per year. Anybody could have
a bad day or week. Mom comes home on a drunken binge and brings the party
with her, or the welfare check doesn’t come in till the first and all a
kid has to eat are the three chicken strips from school lunch that day.
“Nobody
likes being called a failure, and we’ll do whatever we can to not get that
label.”
Starnes says
she can’t think of a worse time to be a teacher in America. She says
teaching to a test kills teachers’ enthusiasm and creativity, crucial
traits for teaching Indian education in a meaningful way.
“NCLB
guts everything that is exciting about teaching and learning and turns it into
a robotic activity,” Starnes says.
Heather Gaston,
a high school English teacher in her sixth year at Rocky Boy, agrees that the
more creative teachers are the more frustrated they become.
“When
you are just coming out of school, where you learned about all of these new ways
of facilitating classes and learning — that model doesn’t fit with
the standardized tests,” she says. “ I was a product of a Texas
high school where they taught to the test. It’s the whole ‘trying
to run education as a business’ idea. It’s not a business. There
are a lot of unquantifiable variables. There is a real disconnect between
the policymakers and the teachers.”
Linda Engebretson
teaches high school biology and geometry and is known for her unit on plants
traditionally used by Indians. After three weeks of study, she and Rick
Sun Child, the high school Cree studies teacher, take the students to gather
plants the “proper” way. Sun Child offers tobacco to the Great
Spirit and they pray. The kids love it, she says. But there’s no
test standard for that kind of learning. And getting test scores up gets priority.
Gaston says
her students get a lot of “test anxiety.”
“They
have trouble seeing meaning in the tests,” she says. “You
don’t have a lot of buy-in, so they don’t do their best. I
certainly don’t think the tests reflect our students’ abilities.”
Yet some Indian
teachers and administrators bristle at Starnes’ suggestion that there is
an American Indian learning style that prevents test-taking success.
Principal St. Pierre blames a decline in the value of education rather than a
certain learning style.
“We
have a lot of young parents on the reservation, and lots of kids who don’t
have mom and dad at home — they may have mom, or dad, or grandma, or auntie,” St.
Pierre says. “No one is at home telling them education is important.
Schools are doing their best, but parents and community are the key.”
Social problems
do beset the community.
Capps, who
has taught 18 years in Rocky Boy schools, lives with her husband in teacher housing
across from the school. They see daily what their students contend with.
“We had a little boy ring our doorbell at 3 a.m. needing a ride home,” Capps
says. “That happens, I wouldn’t say often, but it happens. The
kids stay for a basketball game till 10 p.m. and it’s 10 below out; they
need a ride home.”
She says she
knows parents love their children and want to keep them safe, but that doesn’t
always translate into action.
All told, St. Pierre, who will take over as district superintendent in July,
thinks No Child Left Behind has been good for Rocky Boy.
“No
Child Left Behind makes everybody accountable and, finally, everyone uses the
same measurement of success,” says St. Pierre.
“It
levels the playing field.”
He says as
superintendent the law will be “at the top of my list.”
By 2014, all
schools are supposed to be at least proficient. And “all” includes “special
education kids, minority kids, free and reduced lunch kids,” he notes.
St. Pierre
admits that goal is “not realistic.”
But for his
students, St. Pierre rejects the notion that teaching to the test changes Indian
students or diminishes their culture.
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