The testing requirements mandated by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act are pushing schools towards placeless, one-size-fits-all, national standards, test-prep curriculums. These curriculums are often textbook driven and at the secondary level involve assigning students to read a chapter and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. This is a boring task for just about any student, and for students who don't read well, it is an invitation for them to drop out of school.

In contrast to these nation- or state-wide curriculums is the "place-conscious" education movement that in the words of Robert Brooke (2003) "asks us to think of context--to think of the interdependence of individual, classroom, community, region, history, ecology" (p. 10). The idea is to link students lives to their home communities whether that community be an Indian reservation, a barrio, or a rural Nebraskan town. Place-conscious education "teaches how to live well, actively, and fully in a given place" (p. ix).

Place-conscious education teaches intradependence rather than independence. It emphasizes that fact that we can't change one thing without having many other linked changes (often damaging unintended consequences). The idea is to have students study their communit--where it has been and where it should be going. It calls for active students "engaging with local issues" (Brooke, 2003, p. 13). It is an education for democratic citizenship starting with local issues and local government that helps students discover the connection between their classrooms and their futures.

In regard to teaching writing, place-conscious education gets students to write about what they know, about where each one is. They can interview veterans, tribal officials, and elders for their writing assignments. A good older example of place-conscious curriculum material is the book Between Sacred Mountains: Navajo Stories and Lessons from the Land (Arthur, Bingham, & Bingham, 1982/1995) produced at Rock Point Community School on the Arizona portion of the Navajo Reservation. The Foxfire books (See Wigginton, 1986) produced in Appalachia are another example for place-conscious writing instruction.

Phips Ross notes that students researching and writing their "family stories keep the past alive in the present" (in Brooke, 2003, p. 57). This keeping the past alive helps keep students rooted to their heritage so that they have a strong sense of who they are. This sense of identity is an important stabilizing factor in an increasingly materialistic and hedonistic world. Too often today, American Indian children only see jobs and opportunities outside of their tribal communities, which means the best and brightest often leave to contribute to the growth of other communities at the expense of their home community.

While place conscious education is not a cure-all to educational or community problems, it can focus students attention on finding solutions to these challenges. Too often students don't see the relevance of algebra, chemistry and other school subjects to their lives. Place-conscious education can provide practical application of schooling to students' lives and set them on the path to using their education to improve their communities.

Note

On March 8-10, 2004, the Bureau of Indian Affair's Office of Indian Education Programs (OIEP) held its third Language and Culture Preservation Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. OIEP director Ed Parisian welcomed the large gathering of Bureau educators to this meeting, emphasizing the BIA's goal that "students will demonstrate knowledge of language and culure to improve academic achievement." He went on to say that "we know from research and experience that individuals who are strongly rooted in their past who know where they come from are often best equipped to face the future."

Dr. Parisian's words are in sharp contrast to the ideas of the English-only advocates and the anti-multiculturalists such as put forward by Arthur Schlesinger Jr's Disuniting of America (1991) where he wrote that:

Bilingualism shuts doors. It nourishes self-ghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism. Using some language other than English dooms people to second-class citizenship in American society . Monolingual education opens doors to the larger world. Institutionalized bilingualism remains another source of the fragmentation of America, another threat to the dream of one people. (pp. 108-109).

I could only attend a few of the many concurrent sessions. One the sessions I chose to attend was on the Acoma Language Retention Program. The session leader Christine Sims noted that "it is easy to shut off language learning" by correcting students' efforts right away and over and over, pronunciation should not be made the main thing right away, and students should not get drill, drill, drill on their mistakes. She suggested using nursery rhymes that used to be taught in the home. Dr. Sims felt that it was important to have two speakers in the classroom so students could observe two fluent speakers in a conversation. She concluded that language learners need to be "bathed" in a rich language environment and that students need at the very least one hour a day of language class for any chance of success at getting students to be fluent speakers.

Another session I was able to attend was put on by Namaka Rawlins, the director of the Hawaiian Aha Punana Leo program. She was making her third appearance at the OIEP language conferences. She noted that in Hawaii they are working now to get a Hawaiian Ph.D. degree program approved. While they started with preschool language nests, they have moved on to elementary, secondary, and now university Hawaiian language medium (immersion) classes. The Hawaiian language medium school movement has been parent driven. Rather than ghettoization, she noted that "our traditions are relevant for all students' education," and some non-Hawaiians are in the immersion programs.

Students in the Hawaiian immersion classes are doing equal to or better than English students, but it takes about two years to fully transition to an all-English program if they drop out of the Hawaiian program. The success of the program is tied to the commitment of parents and teachers. For teachers, "this is a way of life; it's not just a job."

It was not till 1986 that the 1896 law against using the Hawaiian language in schools was repealed. There are now 22 immersion or Hawaiian medium schools with about 2,000 children enrolled. Only four schools can teach algebra and biology in Hawaiian because of the lack of qualified teachers. As Hawaiian medium instruction matures, teachers are moving from translating curriculum from English to Hawianizing it.

The second day keynote speaker Jack Jackson spent nineteen and a half years in the Arizona state legislature. He now works at Diné College where they are "in a search to create our future based on our past." Jackson emphasized the importance of teaching Navajos the Navajo philosophy of "Ké," being a balanced person. This involves examining "beauty before me [where am I going?], beauty behind me [where did I come from?], beauty underneath [my relation to mother earth.], beauty above, and beauty around; with beauty I speak" in the pursuit of becoming a "balanced person."

Another speaker emphasized how today, with assimilation, kids go from the baby bottle to the coke bottle to the beer bottle, but "if we bring resentment, we learn how to hate." This reminded me of a quote Metis historian David T. McNab recalls hearing at the Toronto International Pow-wow in 2000: "The Elders tell us that it is alright to feel angry about stuff like this [e.g., the Sand Creek Massacre] and it is good. However, in the end you must go down to the river, offer a gift of tobacco to the Creator and simply let the anger go .... Otherwise the anger will poison your spirit..." Living with anger either bottled up or expressed is unhealthy, and a process of healing needs to take place. This does not mean that as part of the educational process students do not need to remember the past and learn how to fight for their rights and learn their responsibilities.

However, it turns out I was too optimistic about making changes in schools to improve the chances of success for American Indian and other minority students as can be seen by the ongoing attacks on bilingual education and the increasing use of high stakes testing. I am thinking more and more that those of us who want minorities to achieve greater academic success are going to have to follow the lead of John U. Ogbu and focus more on what minority students, their parents, and their communities can do to promote academic success in spite of the negative aspects of many schools.

Ogbu (2003) has studied for three decades why some minorities do well in American schools and others do not. His most recent study is titled Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb. Here he focuses on trying to understand why middle-class Black students in a very well funded school district are not as academically successful as their middle-class White peers, including being underrepresented in Honors and Advance Placement (AP) classes. An anthropologist, Ogbu used interviews and classroom observations to examine the dynamics influencing students' academic performance.

Ogbu has found in his research that some minority groups are much more academically successful than others in American schools. He differentiates between voluntary (immigrant) minorities, including many Asian immigrants, who do well and involuntary minorities, including Blacks and American Indians, who don't do as well. Voluntary minorities see schooling as a path to economic advancement, while doing well in school was equated by some Black students with "acting White," and "once individuals exceeded the level expected of them, other Blacks in the community would begin to criticize them" (p. 209). Students with oppositional identities to White culture and schools tended to suffer academically while students with home cultures that were viewed as just different from the culture of the school could do quite well.

While Ogbu found some school-based reasons for black students below average performance, such as counselors having too many students to deal with to provide much individual attention, much of the challenge he finds is in the students themselves and their families. Some Black students did not know why they needed to learn math, and they "did not view their present schooling as a preparation for their future participation in the adult opportunity structure" (p. 167). Some students "naively assumed that regardless of how they did in school they would end up in or inherit the socioeconomic status as their parents" (p. 169).

Teachers could be found with low expectations for Black students, but the role of students in creating teacher expectations, high or low, can be overlooked. Ogbu found that "the attitudes and behaviors of some Black students were partly responsible for the teachers' low expectations" (p. 129). Black students did not raise their hands as much as White students and were more likely to come to class without having done their homework. Blacks students were more likely to be distracted from classroom academics than White students, and Ogbu found a "norm of minimal effort" among some middle and high school Blacks. "It was not cool to work hard in school or to be academically engaged" (p. 213). Other things were more important, including "consumerism" and sports. Consumerism led students from middle-class families to take part-time jobs so they could have cell phones, computer games, and stylish clothes, and athletics distracted students from academics. Ogbu's research confirmed other studies that found that "some Black students invested so much time in sports that they had little time for their academic schoolwork" and "for some students, playing sports was all that mattered" (p. 157). The media aggravates student¹s consumerism and obsession with sports, making "athletes, entertainers, drug dealers and their success, wealth, or reputations more visible than Black doctors, lawyers, and other professionals" (p. 164).

Ogbu found that some Black parents "did not perceive themselves as active agents in the education process.... The role of parents is apparently limited to putting pressure on teachers to do their job of teaching well; that is, limited to pushing teachers and other school personnel to educate their children" (p. 236). Ogbu found "dismal" Black parent involvement both at school and at home. While there is a history of "collective mistreatment" shared by involuntary minorities, including American Indians, Hispanics, and Blacks, that influences their view of White people and White institutions, including schools, the mistrust engendered by this history can hurt students chances for doing well in school. The emphasis on discrimination, "on breaking the barriers in education and in the opportunity structure," led to ignoring "the behavior and attitudes that are conducive to school success" (148).

Ogbu does not recommend minority students assimilate in order to be academically successful. He finds that minorities can accommodate to "White" schools without assimilating and that students can successfully learn and use Standard English, which is needed for school success, while continuing to speak their home and community language, whether it be a tribal language, Spanish, or Ebonics. The home and community language is an important part of the community's collective identity.

In a series of studies of American Indian college students, Terry Huffman (2002) found that students' collective identity is critical to their academic success. Indian students going to college often find little there with which to relate and suffer feelings of alienation. Some of these students quickly become disillusioned, seeing schooling as assimilation to White culture and dropping out. Others persist, drawing personal strength from their Native heritage and learning to relate to White culture, using their traditional culture as an anchor.

While it is a mistake to believe that schools today have no problems, it is also a mistake to believe that they are the total problem and that minority students are victims that can't individually fight and overcome the educational odds against them. In fact, when parents and community members hold teachers and schools, rather than themselves and their children, entirely responsible for their children's academic performance they play into hands of conservatives seeking to destroy public schools (Bracey, 2002).