Tutors work to boost Native students
http://www.adn.com/news/education/story/754940.htmlDropout rates are higher, test scores are lower than for students overall
Published: April 9th, 2009 09:13 PM
Last Modified: April 10th, 2009 05:56 PM
Shafts of sunlight stream through the windows and illuminate the four sixth-graders gathered around the table with Kerri Wood.
Wood is working to solve a vexing problem: Get these kids up to grade level.
Wood is the Indian-education tutor at Tyson Elementary in Mountain View. She is part of a multi-pronged effort involving the Anchorage School District, nonprofits and tribal groups to close the test-score gap between Anchorage's 4,200 Native students and the rest of the district's 48,000 kids.
It's not just poorer test results. Native students have also historically had the highest dropout rate in Anchorage.
Wood works for the school district but her salary is funded by federal Indian Education Act money. The district spends about $2 million of federal money a year on tutors like her. And while administrators say modest gains have been made, the gap is still big.
Last year, scores took a dive. Results in math, reading and writing lagged behind all students by some 15 percentage points.
In December, with the district saying more Native kids are moving into the city from rural Alaska, the School Board tapped the district's own general fund for the first time to increase the number of tutors by a third.
"The needs of Alaska Native/American Indian students are profound," the district said.
STRADDLING TWO WORLDS
Among the grim statistics from last school year's data:
• By the end of ninth grade, only 58 percent of Native students had enough credits to be on track to graduate in four years, compared with 77 percent of all students.
• Only 1 percent of Natives took higher-level high school courses compared with 8 percent of all students.
• Two-thirds of Native students didn't get their diplomas after four years of high school.
The problem starts at a young age.
Many education experts, including former Alaska education commissioner Roger Sampson, say that if a student is not reading at grade level by the third grade, the student's chances of ever catching up are slim. It is an indicator of the future dropout rate, he has said.
Last year, 67 percent of Native third-grade students in Anchorage read at grade level compared with 81 percent of all students.
Educators don't know exactly what's wrong.
The problems are varied, they say. Teachers who reward the most animated students, when Native children are taught to be demure. Kids who show up at school without breakfast. Westernized curriculum that teaches young children unfamiliar words like teacup, cow and sailboat.
In a grant application to fund an upcoming program for Native boys, whom the district consider to be the most vulnerable, the district wrote that many Native homes are not highly verbal. Another problem may be how the students are being taught. Native boys, in particular, are not reached by many of the usual instructional methods, the grant application says.
"We are not understanding the home culture," said Doreen Brown, the district's Indian Education supervisor, who has the job of solving the puzzle. "We are so good at the academic culture we don't understand the home culture. We don't understand the home language. We, as educators, don't understand the experiences that these kids are coming to us with, and it's very different than white middle class. It's not bad, it's just very different."Brown, who is Yup'ik, knows many of these kids are straddling two worlds, just as she did growing up in Anchorage and graduating from Service High in the 1980s. "My people have been educated for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. We've been educated, we've survived in the harshest environments. And I can look at my own life and I'm technically only the third generation to go to school. That's not a large amount of time," she said.
Brown is in charge of 45 employees, including Wood. She runs summer enrichment programs and after-school tutoring. She works on dropout prevention. She does crisis-intervention. And she secures federal grant money, or any grants she can find, to make it all happen.
"What are we not doing right? I think one of the strongest components is that we're not making (education) culturally responsive," she said.
"A lot of Native students don't want to be the center of attention. They don't want to raise their hands, 'I know the answer! I know the answer!' "
Before she became supervisor, when she worked directly with Native students, she would have kids practice raising their hands, she said.
Brown says there's not enough money to reach every kid. She has to be selective. In the end, tutors are placed at the schools with the highest population of Natives, and within those schools, it's the kids who score the worst who are tutored.
Brown says there are about 9,000 Natives and part-Natives who are eligible for the Indian Education services. She says her staff is reaching about 30 percent of them.
Asked if she thinks the tutoring is making a difference, she paused. "It can be effective. I think that our students and our parents need a point of contact. ... I would say most of my staff are very overwhelmed."
Research shows that if tutoring is to make a difference, students need to see their tutors at least three times a week for 30 minutes, she said. That's the formula. But sometimes, Brown says, that isn't happening.
Wood, at Tyson, said Native fifth-graders at the school aren't being tutored because of scheduling conflicts, and some of her sixth-graders get tutoring only twice a week.
SAFE LEARNING
Back in her classroom, Wood, who is Athabascan, asks sixth-grader La-Vera Wise about the noun she is looking at on the textbook page. "Is it a person, place or thing?"
She moves from one child to the next, reviewing each of the children's work as they locate proper nouns and common nouns. The four sixth-graders are too big for the undersized plastic chairs and low-hung table.
Wood works with 45 of Tyson's 140 Native kids.
She points to a sentence. "Can you find one here? Can you show me?" she asks, goading La-Vera.
Later, Wood explains she circles the children and watches over their shoulders to catch mistakes as they happen. She also prefers to correct them one-on-one, not in a group setting. "You need to create a safe learning environment," she says.
Sometimes Wood re-teaches what the children's teachers have already covered. Other times, she pre-teaches so kids are ready with answers and concepts.
"Sometimes it's setting them up for success," Brown explained of the tactical ego boosts. "It feels good."
Every month, the children are tested and their scores combed over.
"Looking at the data and making adjustments to teaching style is something that we take very seriously here," Wood said. "If things aren't working, we have to change it. And if it's still not working, we need to change it again."
She said the goal is to get the kids up to grade level so they don't have to see her anymore.
La-Vera, who is 13, lives in Anchorage with her stepsister while the rest of her family lives in the Western Alaska village of Upper Kalskag. Her father, Andrew Wise, said he thinks the tutoring is making a difference -- it's one of the reasons he lets her live in the city.
It is important that his daughter graduate from high school, he said. "I put myself through school," he said of getting his diploma. "It made a difference."
Counting Native students
Test score results for ethnic groups are based on how students self-identify. In October, the number of Anchorage School District students who said they are Native on district forms was 4,200.
However, the number of students eligible for Native education services is 9,000. This larger number includes the students who are part Native. On school district forms, some of the additional students might self-identify as multiethnic.
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