Aprille J. Phillips is an associate professor of education at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She is the author of Culturally Sustaining Policymaking in Indigenous Communities: Partnering to Promote Lasting Change.
There is a buzz of conversation as students walk through iSanti Community School’s atrium past a mural chronicling Dakota history: from the lakes and trees of Minnesota, to the Christmas Day Massacre near Mankato, MN where more than 38 Dakota warriors were hanged, to the forced removal of the Dakota people to South Dakota, and then to Northeast Nebraska, and the current Santee Dakota Sioux Reservation there. The smells of bacon and eggs waft from the open gymnasium doors where cafeteria-style tables have been set up for a back-to-school breakfast. iSanti Community School’s (iCS) superintendent, the ninth in 10 years, is in the kitchen and it’s all-hands-on deck as kitchen staff and school leaders serve food to students, teachers, and staff. Soon, there will be morning announcements, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Dakota Flag Song, and the 2024–2025 school year will commence. And while it looks like a typical small rural school start to a new year, iCS is in its ninth year under a state-imposed improvement structure authorized under state accountability legislation passed in 2014.
It has also been nine years since I first sat among iCS staff at the same cafeteria tables. For just over a year I served as the Nebraska Department of Education liaison to the newly identified priority school. Since leaving, however, I have chronicled the state’s intervention work in Santee. This case of state-directed school improvement efforts in Indian Country, borne out of school accountability policy, is not novel. Broadly, education policy toward Indigenous peoples in the United States has all too often eliminated Native identity, culture, and community in schools. Top-down external improvement mandates for “fixing” schools has resulted in narrowed, less culturally responsive learning experiences for students (e.g., Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; McCarty & Lee, 2014).
“States like Montana, Oregon, and Washington have provided examples of culturally responsive policies that include the teaching of Native history and culture in public schools.”
Education policy history implores us to consider what culturally responsive and sustaining approaches to policymaking and implementation—approaches that are authentic and resist simplistic ways of incorporating cultural knowledge—look like in practice. In recent years, states like Montana, Oregon, and Washington have provided examples of culturally responsive policies that include the teaching of Native history and culture in public schools. Montana’s Indian Education for All policy ensures collaboration among PK–12 schools, higher education, and Tribal entities to encourage the inclusion of Native cultures through culturally responsive and sustaining approaches (Hopkins, 2020).
What culturally responsive policymaking and implementation looks like in contexts where a state has assumed the authority to direct local school improvement efforts is less clear. Throughout the process of developing iCS’s annual progress plans and ongoing improvement efforts, there have been glimpses into what culturally responsive policymaking could look like.
Cultivate Authentic Connections
Initially, my liaison role was meant to be embedded within the school in order to generate collaboration across the department of education with school leadership and members of the Tribal community. This kind of intermediary ambassador role could have promoted the implementation of culturally responsive and sustaining interventions in collaboration with the community. Instead, the state has hired a revolving door of external consultants since 2016, many of whom bring no prior experience working in rural or Tribal contexts.
Listen, Learn, and Co-Construct
Throughout the development of Santee’s priority plan, educators, representatives from the Santee community, and local school board leadership shared consistent visions for what they believed improvement should look like at iCS—visions that were ultimately not included in official progress plans. Instead, improvement plans have been largely developed by contracted external consultants and representatives of the Nebraska Department of Education before being presented to the state board of education for approval. There has been little opportunity for local school or Tribal leaders to work alongside these external entities to co-construct improvement plans that ultimately, local educators will be held accountable for implementing. Certainly there have been missed opportunities for state policymakers and intermediaries to listen, learn, and create structures to encourage the co-construction of annual improvement plans.
Clarify Shared Objectives
Contributing to local frustration is an ever-shifting set of expected outcomes for each improvement plan, without any concrete insights into what demonstrated progress would allow iCS to move out from under state oversight and to maintain its own governance without state surveillance.
Center Local Ways of Knowing and Being
Over and over again the state has relied on the symbolic presence of Tribal members at the tables where planning decisions are made, but has overlooked the opportunities for meaningful engagement in developing culturally responsive and sustaining improvement strategies. Ultimately, culturally responsive and sustaining policymaking and state-directed school improvement implementation should center local ways of knowing and being. It should incorporate the language, history, and customs present in a Native community. In the past nine years, culturally responsive and sustaining efforts at improvement have happened, but they have been separate from the state’s efforts and fostered at the local level. These local efforts remain largely absent from the state’s narratives around improvement efforts in Santee.
“Culturally responsive policymaking and state-directed school improvement implementation should center local ways of knowing and being.”
Cultivating culturally responsive policymaking and implementation in Indian Country requires approaches that reflect commitments to justice that reject linguicide, colonization, and deficit framing. Nebraska Department of Education oversight in Santee since 2015 has not reflected the qualities of culturally sustaining and revitalizing policymaking, including humility and a willingness to listen and to understand the ways that even well-intentioned policies to improve student outcomes may also homogenize and pathologize. And yet, in the absence of culturally responsive approaches to state oversight, people in Santee continue bring their own improvement visions to reality outside of the official turnaround efforts directed by the state. The work on the ground among educators and community members remains focused on serving students well, and their ongoing acts of improvement are making a difference. Beyond higher graduation rates or assessment scores, you can smell it in the bacon and eggs, hear it in the caring conversations about learning among students and staff at a back-to-school breakfast, and feel it reverberating through the walls of the old gymnasium when students sing the Flag Song. As a day of learning commences at iCS, there are clear lessons for policymakers to consider far beyond Santee.
References
Castagno, A. E., & Brayboy, B. M. J. (2008). Culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 941–993.
Hopkins, J. P. (2020). Indian education for all: Decolonizing indigenous education in public schools. Teachers College Press.
McCarty, T. L., & Lee, T. (2014). Critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy and indigenous education sovereignty. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 101–124.