Larry Byers (Native Voices) | Native Students

Native Voices

Larry Byers

Spring 2004

Larry Byers has been at Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, for 28 years. In his words, he's "worked in almost every part of the school except the kitchen," and currently serves as principal and school supervisor. Byers, a Cherokee Indian, attended Southern Oregon University on a tribal scholarship from the Cherokee Nation.

Describe the mix of students at Chemawa.

When I first came here, Chemawa was a Northwest school—almost all the students came from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, or Montana. We were the only school option besides public school when I came here in 1976. Now you have public alternative schools, charter schools, and 12 tribal schools in the Northwest. That's taken a lot of the population we used to get. Now students come from 17 to 21 different states and there's no single predominant tribe. It's truly an intertribal setting.

What are the benefits of that?

There are pros and cons. The pros are that you don't have just one culture or one way of thinking. You have to look at educating these students on a more regionalized basis if you're using cultural values. Being Native people, we never want to make you own somebody else's culture. We've learned over the years to value diversity and value each other and learn from one another. I think that's a huge opportunity. When you say Native American, people think of a single group of people, but we're really hundreds of different tribes with our own distinct cultures. We have a lot of similarities, but there are differences, too. We're the most diversified school in the state of Oregon.

Describe the academics at Chemawa.

We're trying to give our students the opportunity to succeed from where they come to us, and that's a different philosophy from most other schools. Most schools are set up so that students fit into their system, and kids who don't conform are taken out of the system. That's why there are so many kids in alternative schools. Most schools are starting right now (in January) on next year's program and by April or May, their class schedules are all designed and everything is in place for next year. No matter who you are, walking in as a freshman, you're going to go into their system. And if you're not performing at that level, then you're left behind and you're treading water.

A good example is that most schools have eliminated anything but Algebra I at the ninth grade level and they've expanded Algebra I to a two-year program, called Algebra for All. I call it "Algebra Forever." A lot of kids never get through it. They kind of spin their wheels because they never had the skills to go into it in the first place. In that kind of system, 35–38 percent of students typically fail, and that's considered acceptable. And they also fail if they're put in lower-level math classes because they're not designed for students who don't fit into the system. That's how I see it.

About five years ago, as academic principal, I made a commitment to our staff and students that we wouldn't work in that system. That's a total change of philosophy for a school with close to 400 students. It's usually a philosophy for an alternative school setting with 50 or 60 kids, where you can manipulate the system and design it for one or two teachers.

So, how did you get that approach to work at Chemawa?

It took me a year of setting the groundwork with staff meetings, staff development, and dialogue about what was working and what wasn't. I did some research. I looked at Ruby Payne's book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which talks about schools as middle class systems. If we take students who aren't middle class and try to force them into middle class worlds, there's going to be a clash there. We won't understand students, they won't understand us—the language is so different.

We built a system based on our population of students each year and on their performance. True performance—not grades or grade levels or expectations of another system, but our kids. We took our two main focuses, language arts and math, and broke them into six levels of instruction. Levels 1 and 2 are elementary-level reading and math skills, first through sixth grade. If students are performing at that level, our Level 1 and 2 classes are going to teach them where they are, filling in the gaps.

We found that most of our students were bright, but they had gaps in their education because they didn't go to school for certain periods of time. If you have attendance rates of 50–60 percent, the kids are only getting parts of it. We decided to teach those kids at whatever level they're at, accept them for that, and move them ahead as fast as we can. We do that with individual reading classes, one hour a day, and the same with math: individualized teaching, computerized teaching, whatever it takes.

Then there is Level 3, which is like seventh or eighth grade—a higher level, but not high school level. Level 4 is ninth or 10th grade students, usually freshmen or sophomores, but it's based on performance level, not age. I don't care if you're a freshman or senior, if you're performing at that level, we're going to teach you at that level. Level 5 is (equivalent to) 11th grade and Level 6 is 12th grade.

What we found is that the majority of our students were at Level 3. We knew this all along, but we were teaching high school curriculum and failing 50 percent of our students and it wasn't their fault that they didn't have the skills. So instead of blaming kids, we said, "We understand our population, let's teach them for who they are."

To be able to do this, we had to change everything. We trained our whole staff in the six writing traits, we took a look at standardized reading and math evaluations, and we developed our own protocols. Then we took a look at our returning students and figured out what level they were at and placed them appropriately. We brought our new kids in a week early. We did all the orientation, the assessments, and at the end of the week—after assessing all of our students in reading, writing, and math—we had a picture of our whole population. At that point, we built our schedule for the year. Our teachers didn't know what they would be teaching until the last minute. They knew they were English teachers, but they didn't know what level they would be teaching because we didn't know how many kids would need Level 1 and 2 and so on.

What we found was that we only needed one class that covered Levels 4–6. Only 20 kids out of 400 were at that level; everyone else was below that. But that's what we're about: getting out of this make-believe world, teaching kids where they're at, and helping them be successful. Our whole hypothesis was that if kids didn't feel successful, there would be more of the same failure. They really wouldn't connect to education, wouldn't give us an effort, and we really wouldn't see what they could do. So, we built some of our own safeguards. We celebrate learning, we celebrate our students, and we make education important to them. We don't penalize them for what they don't know. We just accept who they are and celebrate the learning that takes place once they get here.

What other kinds of restructuring did you have to do?

We found that traditional 45-minute classes and 18-week semesters didn't work for us. Kids would just get started and class was over. But at 90 minutes we couldn't keep them connected long enough. The traditional options didn't work for us. And we felt that was leading to some of our failures.

So we took a look at other options. We figured out that if you have school for nine weeks, at 70 minutes a class, it's nearly the same as 90-minute classes for nine weeks. That way we could keep the semester grading system but with trimesters. What we were seeing was that our kids could do about 12 weeks of work and in the last six weeks they would fail a course because they'd go home, something would come up—Thanksgiving or Christmas break—those kinds of transitions hurt our kids. So, now our first trimester ends at Thanksgiving and the second ends in February. That way, if students do lose focus between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we're only losing three weeks; we still have nine weeks after that. We built this system for our needs at Chemawa, not the other world.

What kind of results have you seen from these reforms?

After the first year, 85 kids had made honor roll. This year we have 97. It's not a typical high school honor roll—it means those kids are performing well at the level they're at, whether it's Level 1 or Level 6. But these are kids who were failing the system. Now all of a sudden they are talking about being on the honor roll, getting good grades. Their commitment was renewed. We saw this immediately, but after five years, we really see it.

We have an awards ceremony every month to celebrate success. That's one of the things I put in immediately. There are 10 students of the month, with no set criteria. Teachers can nominate any student who is showing improvement. They can turn in 10 assignments out of 50, but if they had been turning in none before, they need to be recognized. We take them out to lunch and to a movie, we write a letter home to their parents—all the things we think will instill in them a desire to be successful. Most of the students coming in have never been on the honor roll in a school setting. One year I looked at the GPA of all the new kids coming in here and the average was .79. So, you take kids who haven't been successful, for all kinds of reasons, and you put them in a structured environment where every day they come to school, their classmates go to school. That's a big change. You give them a chance to be successful, and then you celebrate that and make them feel good about that. The culture changes from being an unsuccessful school to a very successful school, based on the performance of students.

Do you do Oregon benchmarks?

We don't. The reason is that not all of our students come from Oregon. The best thing we can do is what we're doing now: build a system in which it doesn't matter what educational level you walk in the door with, we're going to educate you as far as we can, as long as we have you.

Any other advice?

You can't put your values on the students. Too often, we're trying to put a middle class world on a non-middle class population. We want them to be just like us. Maybe they don't want to be like that; they want to be themselves. You have to understand the values of your student population and then figure out how you can help them be successful within their own value system. That's hard. Schools aren't designed like that: They're designed to take a population and make them all look the same. But maybe they want to be successful on their own terms. That's the hardest thing to learn: They'll value what they need to value. They don't have to be like somebody else.

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