Second in a series of columns
Native American students score below average nationally on standardized tests and Alaska Native children test below other Native Americans. Alaska's students as a whole perform near the bottom of the 50 states and village schools come in at the bottom of scores in Alaska.
Test results leave out a lot of information but at the lowest levels they do reveal if students can read and do basic math. In 2011, when the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress focused on Native American students, Alaska Natives were at or near the bottom on every measure.
In math, 50 percent of Alaska Native fourth-graders scored "below basic," the lowest level. Only 14 percent scored proficient or above. State tests show that in some rural schools, a minority of students learn basic levels of math and reading for their grade level.
There are plenty of exceptions — Native children who are doing well and rural schools that are working — but overall, the situation is unacceptable.
The reasons are complex. But race is not one of them.
A report commissioned (and ignored) by the Alaska Legislature from Denver-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates found last year that Alaska's test scores correlate closely with measures of poverty and low English proficiency. In Alaska's lowest-performing rural districts, almost every family lives in poverty and students often arrive in kindergarten without knowing their colors or other beginning English terms.
We need exceptionally good schools to give these students a chance. But village schools are the weakest in Alaska.
Teachers and administrators often stay only a year or two. Typically, their replacements arrive with little experience as educators and scant knowledge of the culture or environment.
Few Alaska students become teachers. Two-thirds of new hires come from other states. The poor education provided in many rural schools makes the academic path to becoming a teacher extremely difficult for students from those communities.
A typical teacher arriving in the fall at a remote village school is a brand-new graduate from a state with high unemployment. She finds herself in a shabby plywood house in a village without businesses or restaurants and no way to leave other than an expensive small plane ride. Slow internet cuts her off from social media.
Worse, she often feels unwelcome in a community that seems uninterested in her work. The village can even seem hostile and dangerous. When a nonprofit organization I led several years ago offered grants to aid rural schools with teacher retention, one district used the money to put bars on the windows of its teacher housing.
Why isn't this new teacher welcomed more warmly? Villagers have seen people like her cycle through endlessly. Students don't bond with teachers they know are leaving.
And there's something deeper. Western education originally came to Alaska Natives as a source of oppression and shame — or at least that's how many elders remember it. We've failed to document the trauma of the boarding school era, so the testimony of abuse like that of Jim LaBelle, whom I profiled in my last column, remains controversial among historians and other Alaskans who didn't suffer as he did.
[As an elder recalls abuse, the horror of Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools lives on]
I can't count how many times Alaska Native elders have told me their stories of having their culture and language suppressed in boarding school — and of abuse — and how often those stories have come to me as well from younger people, recounting what a parent or grandparent told them. The pain lives on.
Pausauraq Harcharek, an education innovator at the North Slope Borough School District, said Alaska Native communities often don't trust schools. She knows of the trauma of boarding school from her mother.
"The lack of trust I really believe stems back to the practices of the day, which were to punish children for speaking their languages and to do some of these unspeakable things that were perpetrated on innocent children," Harcharek said. "So it is no wonder that the resulting influence that is going to be felt in later generations is going to be what it is, and that is we wonder if we can even trust the school system. There has never been an apology. There has never been an acknowledgment."
She saw how these emotions pass through generations in a training she offered to teachers in her region. She asked them to think of a favorite teacher of their own and talk about what that teacher did to create a positive connection.
Two of the Natives in the training said they never had a favorite teacher. Their education carried troublesome memories, not examples they could copy in their own practice.
[With few fluent speakers left, young people are teaching Inupiaq as they learn it]
Through the big oil money years, education leaders tried many different ideas to improve rural education, with failures and successes. Often even the best successes didn't last, because they were funded by short-term grants or because they depended on a charismatic individual or another unique set of circumstances.
Resolving the trauma of the past is especially important now that the money is gone. Rural schools are struggling with flat budgets and high costs. We won't be trying many special new programs. Instead, solutions need to come from within — solutions based on the people who live in villages and their own hope for their children.
Alaska Natives already control schools in their communities through school boards, but standards, materials and measures of success come from outside, as do the teachers and administrators. The schools came home, but in these fundamental ways, power over learning remains as it was when children were taken away to school.
Perhaps a formal process such as a commission to expose, document and release the trauma of the past would help communities accept that they own the schools now and can remake them.
Ultimately, only forgiveness can free the oppressed. But before forgiveness must come acknowledgment and apology by the oppressor.
And, in addition, some very small schools will have to close. As I'll argue in my next column, schools too small to provide a meaningful education should not survive.
The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.