About Us
The Native American population in the United States is one of only a few that have been forced to utilize an educational system developed for different people and cultures. The educational system imposed on Native Americans developed from a European model, filtered through mainstream American development and culture. It was designed for a value system and developmental model quite different from most Native American peoples. That is quite likely at least a part of why the dropout rate for Native Americans in the United States educational system is the highest of any cultural group.
It is even higher for reservation educational institutions than those in urban settings. The current educational system for Native American students on the Hopi and Navajo Reservations began as religious training with missionary schools at the end of the 1800s. In the first two decades of the 1900s, the Department of the Army provided schooling primarily based on a military school model. Then, the education of “Indians” was turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). That department continued the military model for decades, mainly in boarding schools on and off the reservations. The militaristic aspects were softened with the advent of day schools on reservations later in the century.
The curriculum materials for all the schools were derived from materials used in schools all over the country. There needed to be more consideration of the needs of the community, the culture of the parents or students, or the values of the local culture. There was simply an imposition of a system from outside. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when local school boards began to take control of the schools through The Indian Self-Determination Act, the board members had only one model of schooling: the aggressive boarding schools they had attended. Only rarely could contemporary good educational practices be incorporated into the reservation schools. Additionally, the BIA kept control of the testing and the academic requirements to be utilized at these schools.
They kept control of the values and processes that had to be taught. These tests were designed for the general, non-Indian population, with little or no normative information from Native people. Many data indicate that minority populations perform poorly on nationally normed standardized tests. Literature indicates cultural bias in the trials, both in content and format. Since school and teacher quality judgments are based on student scores on standardized tests, teachers often emphasize the content, values, and design presented by the test.
The Bureau of Indian Education and Public Schools must use individual state standards based on the school's location. In all states, the state standards are derived from and for the average population of students in the large cities of the state. This, again, assures that mainstream, non-Native values, standards, and processes are enforced.
Hopitutuqaiki uses ideas presented by Jerome Bruner as how a man thinks about his surroundings to organize his classes. The ideas Bruner used were 1) the same and different, 2) structure and function, 3) cause and effect, and 4) patterns. Those conceptual ideas are across all subject areas, allowing for an integrated curriculum. During the 2017 Strategic Planning sessions, the Hopitutuqaiki Board determined that it should work toward a language immersion, arts-based school for Hopi students, beginning with preschool and expanding to higher grade levels. The school is anticipated to use Piaget's developmental levels to organize classrooms.