The government's one-size-fits-all requirements may be too stifling for kids who spend much of their time hunting whales and gathering berries.
Two fifth-grade girls sit outside their school in Gambell, one of two villages on Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. (Sarah Garland)
Wagner Iworrigan, a 17-year-old high school senior on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska, knows a lot about biology, meteorology, and math. He's an expert at telling whether a walrus is too sick to eat, if the weather is likely to turn dangerous, and the best angle for throwing a harpoon at a surfacing bowhead whale.
On a recent unseasonably warm day last fall, he skipped class to join his uncle on their boat. With nets and hooks, they motored through the choppy gray waves of the Bering Sea until the lights of their village, Savoonga, seemed farther than the stars above. They hoped to catch a seven-foot halibut or plump seal to feed the rest of the family: Wagner's two younger sisters, a younger brother, four cousins, and a grandfather. All 10 of them share a three-bedroom house.
Wagner might make a good scientist, but he's not planning on going to college. He feels responsible for his siblings--his mother died of a brain tumor and his father lives in another village--and college is "so far from home." He's also unclear about what he would do with a degree: "We don't have a lot of jobs here." After graduating, he plans to become a commercial fisherman to "make some good money" at one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.
Many students on St. Lawrence--a remnant of the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait thousands of years ago with a current population of less than 1,400--say they want to go to college. But half of them drop out of high school, and only 2 percent graduate from college. The benefits of a degree can seem remote here. Families live a subsistence lifestyle, hunting walruses, seals, and whales in the spring, and gathering berries in the summer. The largest employer is the school system (according to the census, 37 percent of workers in Savoonga are in education); otherwise, there are only a handful of jobs in fishing, oil, and the airlines that connect the island to the mainland. More than a quarter of adults are unemployed.
Across the entire country, one of the most intractable problems in public education is how to fix Native American schools. Beginning in 1928, the federal government has issued scathing reports about the state of Native education and intervened periodically with new programs and reforms. None of them have made much difference. The high school dropout rate of Native students is about
12 percent, higher than that of blacks (8 percent) and of whites (5 percent). Only
39 percent of those who go to college complete a college degree in six years compared to 62 percent of whites and 69 percent of Asians. And while Hispanic and black students have been gaining ground in math and reading, scores for Native students have stagnated over the past decade. In the case of Alaska Natives, they've fallen.
Last year, the Obama administration declared a crisis in Native schools and promised new ideas to improve them. In October, the Department of Education announced a $2 million for a nationwide pilot program to help tribal agencies exert more control over their schools. "Tribal leaders, teachers, and parents are best suited to identify and address the needs of their children," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, when announcing the small grant. "Tribal communities deserve to play a greater role in providing American Indian and Alaska Native students with the tools and support they need to be successful in school and beyond." The program is divvying up the $2 million through competitive grants to tribal agencies and states that propose new ways to improve Native schools.
Despite the high-minded talk, Natives and educators worry the government is repeating past mistakes, pushing top-down reforms that educators say could make outcomes worse. Another program that has received far more resources than the fund to help tribal agencies is Obama's School Improvement Grant (SIG) initiative, which has funneled more than $3 billion to the nation's lowest-performing schools in exchange for specific changes in how the schools are run.
In contrast to the program to help tribes improve their schools, the SIG program has a list of reforms it requires schools to conform to, including hiring new principals and overhauling everything from the length of the school day to how teachers are evaluated.
Native students are disproportionately represented in SIG schools, with about 30,000 enrolled.
Wagner's school in Savoonga and another in Gambell--the two villages on St. Lawrence--have received $1 million each under the SIG program. Combined, it's as much as the federal government is spending in total nationwide on the tribal education program. Their success will be measured largely by how students perform on standardized tests.
"We want our children to achieve academically, but we need to be able to design programs that deal with the challenges they face day-to-day," Ahniwake Rose, executive director of the National Indian Education Association, said. "The federal government is not going to understand what those challenges are."
Those challenges are profound, and most pronounced on the island: How should teachers make school relevant to kids who spend much of their time hunting and gathering berries, with limited exposure to people other than their white teachers who have achieved academic success?
Even though many traditions are still strong, some in St. Lawrence worry that sending children away for higher education could endanger the Yupik language and culture. Already, the younger generation is losing its fluency and grasp of skills like sewing, walrus-ivory carving, and fish-cutting. Can the community raise test scores and send more students to university, without sacrificing its desire to preserve Native culture and language?
In return for the SIG money, the Obama administration wants the schools in St. Lawrence to follow a list of reforms outlined by officials in Washington, D.C. But what those schools really need, locals say, is for the White House to follow through on its promise to listen to what Natives want for their schools, instead of continuing the tradition of telling them what's best.
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The Yupik Eskimos have inhabited St. Lawrence Island continuously for the last 2,000 years, though the first people to touch these lands passed through about 13,000 years earlier from Russia on their way to North America. The island is closer to Siberia than to the Alaskan mainland, and some islanders maintain ties to relatives in Russia, referring to the rest of Alaska and the lower 48 as "America."
The island once housed nearly a dozen villages, but in 1880, famine wiped out much of the population; Western whalers had depleted the sea mammals that comprise much of the Yupik diet. After a hungry winter, a contagious disease killed 1,000 inhabitants, two thirds of the remaining population.
Despite the near-fatal brush with Western culture, the Yupiks rebounded, though only two villages remain. Savoonga and Gambell huddle next to the water on the island's north shore. In summer, meadows of grassy tundra stretch from snow-capped ridges to stony beaches; no trees grow, due to the permafrost. Children help their parents gather delicacies from the tundra, including moss berries, salmon berries, and plant roots. In the winter, the sun disappears for months and relentless snow buries houses, schools, and roads. Polar bears and walruses arrive on ice floes. In the spring, men ride out in 16-foot boats to hunt gray, beluga, and bowhead whales using harpoons rigged with small explosives.
No roads connect Savoonga and Gambell. A ticket off the island on a bush plane costs more than $400, a week's earnings for many islanders. (Nearly half of families in Savoonga make less than $25,000 a year.) Savoonga has a fishery that provides 14 jobs. The only retail business in Gambell is the general store, where food and cleaning supplies cost triple what they would on the mainland. The nearest hospital is across 150 miles of water in Nome, the closest town on the mainland. There are no hotels; when I visited last fall, I slept on the floor of the school library and in a spare room at the principal's house. The sense of community is strong. When a whale is killed, the houses and school empty as everyone races to the beach to take a share of the meat. As Wagner put it, "We're all one big family because we're so isolated."
For decades, the government sent American Indian and Alaska Native students to boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Western society. They were forbidden to speak their own languages and forced to do hours of hard labor each day in exchange for the chance to study. Many were malnourished.
Small communities in Alaska didn't have high schools until the 1980s, so children who wanted a diploma had to attend boarding school, where instruction took place in English. "What if beings from another planet came to the U.S. and we had to immediately learn their language and we had to be just like them?" said Barbara Amarok, a former schoolteacher who works for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks organizing cultural training for new teachers. "That's exactly what happened here." As a result, many parents and grandparents feel alienated and even hostile toward public schools.
The old ways are inevitably changing. There is less sea ice in the Arctic, so polar bears and walruses visit the island less frequently. The children drink soda and eat macaroni-and-cheese in addition to the traditional diet of fish, sea mammals, and berries. They ride snow machines along gravel roads, instead of walking. And in the evening, they prefer playing video games and watching satellite television to listening to their elders tell stories.
Rates of alcohol addiction, suicide, and
teenage pregnancy are skyrocketing, according to locals. Last year, two of the 14 seniors at the Horgarth Kingeekuk Sr. Memorial School killed themselves. Alcohol is banned on the island, but villagers make their own home brew, and some sell it to minors. At the Hugo T. Apatiki School in Gambell last year, the valedictorian, Marina Koonooka, says she had a miscarriage. She said that kids, even motivated students like herself, are drawn into trouble because "there's not much to do here but play basketball."
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