Pablo, Montana—The Flathead Indian Reservation rests in the embrace of the mountains collectively known as the Rockies. To the passerby, the endless towers of basalt seem to merge together, mile after mile. People who live here, however, distinguish individual ranges with names known mostly to the locals. The Mission, Flathead, and Swan ranges recede into a deepening violet haze to the east. The Bitterroot, Salish, Cabinet, Coeur D'Alene, and Purcell mountains blend and overlap, one into another, in a nearly impervious divide to the west. To the reservation's north, icy Glacier National Park feeds the river that rushes into the jewel of the valley, Flathead Lake, whose surface changes from jade green to deep amethyst as a storm gathers high in the surrounding peaks.
In this protected valley, among the sage and the scrub, a little ciderblock school is moving mountains of another sort. Decades of sub-par achievement among the Native children of the reservation are, at last, on the upswing at Pablo Elementary School. Credit belongs to a wide-reaching mix of people and factors. They include a research-based school reform model that matches local needs, a local community dissatisfied with the status quo, a district insistent on raising standards for all kids, and, most critically, a tireless staff that tore headlong into an improvement plan with dogged determination.
Scores on standardized tests are up dramatically (more about that later). But there are signs of academic success that transcend numbers. A recent reading lesson for a group of third- , fourth- , and fifth-graders during the schoolwide 90-minute reading block, for example, strides broadly across the intellectual landscape. From the particulars of a piece of literature—today it's "Dream Wolf" by Paul Goble—students venture into local history, Native lore, current events, environmental issues—wherever, in fact, the trails of ideas might lead them. Under the skillful guidance of veteran teacher Carolyn Pardini, students travel beyond basic vocabulary to poetic imagery. Discussions of plot lead students well past simple story lines to complex interpretation of action, motive, and character. On this stormy morning in mid-May, there is, clearly, a whole lot of critical thinking going on.
Pablo Principal Andrea Johnson's roots run deep here. Back in the days when a barge ferried folks across Flathead Lake to Kalispell, Johnson's grandmother was one of the children who attended tiny two-room Pablo School. Johnson's parents and in-laws all trace their upbringing to the farms and ranches of this valley.
"This was coming home for me," she says of her move into the leadership role of the struggling school several years ago. "It helps if you have an understanding of the community and the diversity and how everybody's interconnected."
A less spirited person might have balked at the academic, behavioral, and political challenges that were inhibiting student performance at Pablo. Not Johnson. This is a woman who often races through the Montana night in an ambulance as an emergency medical technician, rescuing people from car wrecks and suicide attempts because she has insomnia and likes to "stay busy." She's also done search-and-rescue on horseback and in scuba gear. Clearly, she likes to come to the aid of people in trouble.
That is a trait she sorely needed when she arrived at Pablo Elementary, where the problems seemed as steep as the ski slopes of Blacktail Mountain on the west shore of the lake. Of the school's 260 students, 65 percent are American Indian and represent 32 distinct tribes. Achievement data showed a wide and persistent achievement gap between Indian students and white students in all subject areas. But the problems were not limited to academics. Tensions simmered not only between Native and white students, but also among local Native kids (those hailing from the Salish and Kootenai tribes) and those whose parents came from other towns and reservations across the country to attend Salish-Kootenai College in Pablo. Behavioral referrals were too high. Some scuffles even came to blows. Then a review by the U.S. Office for Civil Rights found a disproportionate number of referrals among Native kids in the Ronan-Pablo School District. The reservation's tribal government, the Confederated Tribes of the Salish and Kootenai, demanded reform.
The picture was made infinitely complex by thorny problems hidden beneath students' low scores and angry outbursts. Kids whose grandparents spoke a Native tongue, for example, might come to school without fluency in either English or their ancestral language, making literacy doubly tough to tackle in the classroom. And a lot of the students are descendants of family members who, early last century, were torn from their families at young ages and forced into boarding schools where they were systematically stripped of their language and culture. The resulting bitterness and suspicion among many Indian people toward government-run schools is a persistent undercurrent in the dealings between parents and educators on the reservation.
But Johnson, who's accustomed to digging into twisted metal and broken bones at car crashes, didn't blanch at moving back to the reservation and bringing her own three children to the school district.
The change process began five years ago when Ronan Public Schools administration, responding to tribal concerns for educational equity that coincided with new state requirements for standards-based reform, engaged the whole community in improving education on the reservation.
"Our strategic planning came about because of a huge rift between the Indian community and our school administration and school board," says Terrie Alger, who has lived and taught in the community for 16 years. "We knew we needed to do something to put us back on the right track."
Yet when the principal asked Alger to represent Pablo Elementary in the planning process, she at first refused.
"I said: 'Not me. Conflict is not a place where I'm comfortable.'" Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be persuaded to go to the first meeting. She told Johnson up-front, however, that "if everyone's yelling and screaming and fighting, that's it—I'm done."
But a gifted Missoula-based professional facilitator named Virginia Tribe, hired by the district, kept the lid on the bubbling pot of friction. Over a yearlong series of meetings, she helped to redirect the school community's energies from division to vision.
"Virginia Tribe moved that polarized group to a cohesive, unified group that set a real strong vision for our district," Alger recalls. "In the end, what's best for kids rose up like cream off all the other issues."
The district's eloquent vision statement leaves no doubt about the centrality of children's overall well-being in the community's expectations for its schools:
Ronan-Pablo Public Schools and the community join in partnership to provide a safe, attractive, and orderly learning environment. This positive climate promotes healthy lifestyles where students realize the importance of life-long learning, take responsibility for high personal standards, and feel a greater sense of self-worth and belonging. Each individual will learn to celebrate and be respectful of our rich multicultural community, and students will learn to appreciate the unique heritage and history of the Flathead Reservation. This partnership strives for a standard of excellence where all students achieve their highest personal expectations and are prepared to be successful in today's competitive global society. in this learning environment, students will graduate, prepared to pursue their life choices and to attain their personal visions of success.
With this ideal as a guidepost, each district school—a high school, a middle school, and two elementary buildings—then undertook a comprehensive needs assessment after receiving training from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL). Not a stone was left unturned.
"We looked at curriculum and instruction, we looked at achievement data, attendance data, school climate—everything we could look at about our kids from Grade One up," Johnson says. "We asked the kids, 'Do you like math, do you like lunch, do you like riding the bus?' We asked, 'What's your favorite subject and why?' When we were done, it was very clear what our needs were."
From that clarity four goals emerged. The school set out to increase:
After visiting schools that are using various "off-the-shelf" school reform models and sizing them up against Pablo's goals, the staff decided almost unanimously to adopt Success for All, a widely used program developed by Robert Slavin and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. (For more about this and other models, see NWREL's Catalog of School Reform Models.) They liked its systematic reading and language arts approach, and the solid research that seemed to vouch for results. But what really clinched the choice, according to Johnson, was that Success for All rests heavily on cooperative learning strategies — groups of kids discussing a piece of literature, for example, or pairs of students; deliberating over "meaningful sentences" (they call the activity "think, pair, share," or "buddy buzz"). Studies have shown that because Indian children are raised in a culture of mutual support and collaboration, they are often uncomfortable in competitive or highly individualistic settings (see "Teaching to the Rainbow"). With Pablo leading the way, a number of Montana's reservation schools—Heart Butte, Browning, Poplar, Lame Deer—have since adopted Success for All.
"The cooperative learning strategies are very culturally congruent for Native American students," Johnson notes. "And cooperative learning is a linchpin of the Success for All program. Heart Butte was ecstatic with their scores last year. So we may have been the first, but we're not the last."
The cultural fit shows in the comfort level of the kids exploring the nuances of "Dream Wolf" in Pardini's reading group. As part of their study of the story's vocabulary (words such as kinship, quantities, incomplete, shelter, wounded, roamed), the mixed-aged class, fully engaged and on-task, looks for "inferential clues"—hints in the surrounding words and context—that tell them what the word means. They work in pairs to create sentences about twilight. They collaborate to write, edit, and embellish their descriptions as a class. The imagery that emerges captures not only the poetry of that magical merging of daylight and darkness, but draws upon the landscape of northern Montana and the personal histories of the children who live there. The students speak of owls hooting and coyotes howling. Of frogs croaking and crickets "singing the song of the night." Of the evening star rising bright above the mountains and of neighborhood friends "sneaking around in the shadows" before running home for dinner.
A discussion about the word century brings up images of ancestors and antiques and ancient trees. Safara shares a sentence that reads, "My great, great grandmother had a pair of moccasins that was 100 years old."
Moving on, the teacher guides the class through a talk about Goble's story of a wolf who rescues some children lost in the woods. She uses the Success for All "Treasure Hunt" study guide, which poses a series of probing questions about the text, as a starting point. But Pardini expands and localizes the discussion wherever she can. Starting from speculation about whether the wolf that visited Tiblo in the cave was real or a figure in a dream, she draws the kids into talking about the "spirit animals" that people the mythology of many Indian tribes.
After a pause to marvel at a sudden snow flurry falling unseasonally late, even for Montana, outside the classroom window, she moves on to recent news about the Ninemile wolf pack that roams nearby Glacier park. The pack, reintroduced in northern Montana a decade ago and struggling to survive where wolves had been all but eradicated years before, has stirred strong passions among environmentalists and ranchers in the area. "I think this is a little different story for us than for someone in St. Louis or even Seattle," Pardini says, looking at the young faces, rapt before her. "We aren't going to have wolves running through Pablo, but we could certainly have them using the Mission Mountains to travel." She gestures toward the east where the range lies obscured by the mid-May storm. "The wolves," she says, "are coming back. Do we have them in our hearts and our minds?"
Reading is more than just critical at Pablo—it's sacrosanct. Nothing interrupts the daily 90-minute reading block that immerses first-graders in Success for All's research-based "Roots" of reading skills development and launches them in second grade on the "Wings" of reading proficiency. (Roots and Wings is the companion reading curriculum for Success for All.)
"The 90 minutes of reading is sacred time—that's what we call it," says Johnson. "We don't have assemblies during that time, we don't have field trips during that time. We want to have at least 170 days out of the 180-day school year when we have reading instruction."
Kids are grouped by ability for reading instruction across grades. But they don't get stuck or labeled. Rather, every eight weeks their reading skills are assessed and the groups are reformed to reflect either success or struggle. If a child is excelling, she moves up to a more advanced group. If she's lagging, she gets a tutor until she catches up. No student is left floundering or failing in the back row. Teachers meet regularly with each student, and problems are nipped in the bud. Fully 30 percent of first-graders, 20 percent of second-graders, and 10 percent of third-graders at Pablo receive one-to-one tutoring in reading.
At first, some of the teachers were a little bit squeamish about Success for All's emphasis on systematic phonics, used especially in the first two grade levels when kids need to grasp the raw mechanics of sound-symbol relationships. Johnson, like many other teachers, was trained in whole language at universities where "phonics was the 'f' word," she jokes. But she stresses that phonetics is just a means to understanding, and that comprehension remains the primary focus and ultimate goal of the reading program.
"Kids need all the tools in the toolkits," Johnson asserts. "They need to be able to decode. They need phonological awareness, vocabulary, and fluency in order to be able to comprehend. But as soon as they get the basic sounds, they're on to literature."
Just two years into the new approach, Pablo was already seeing a big payoff. Between 1999 and 2001, for example, the percentage of fourth-graders meeting state standards shot up from 50 percent to 80 percent.
"We have seen a jump in every subject area," says Johnson. "The data show that it's working, and especially for the bottom half. Not only that, we have a lot of kids who are now reading above their grade levels, and that is exciting! We've got kids reading at the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade levels."
"Discrepancies still exist," she admits, "between white and Native American kids, but not in growth. We continue to make more growth as a school than is typical."
The school is on track for meeting its other goals, too. Attendance is up by 15 percent. Referrals are down by 40 percent. And while significant gains in parent involvement remain elusive, the staff is hoping to overcome Indian parents' wariness over time. Terrie Alger advises new teachers who are dealing with Native parents for the first time to "just listen."
In a heartfelt way, the longtime reservation educator says: "I honestly think the key to establishing trust is to listen carefully and to ask a lot of questions—basically, good communication. Often we have parents who come in to speak to us who appear to be very, very angry. Your natural response may be to become defensive. But I think we have to understand that when we're dealing with our Native parents, what looks like anger toward us may really be grief for all that they have lost as a culture."
Julie Cajune has the distinction of being the only full-time Indian education coordinator for a public school district in the state of Montana. Her passion about her work on the Flathead Reservation grows in no small measure from her own rootedness in the region. Her multiethnic heritage—a mixture of Scotch-Irish, Nez Perce, Ojibwe, and French—also includes Salish, one of the tribes native to the reservation in the Rockies where she grew up. Here she talks with deep conviction about what's needed to address the achievement gap in the schools of Pablo and Ronan.
"I was just talking with people yesterday about how we would describe a culturally responsive school environment. If you look at Indian education historically, it hasn't been a very bright picture for Indian people. There is still a very vivid memory of the boarding school era. So we are still dealing with a great percentage of the Indian community that has a certain level of distrust for the school institution, and for whether the school has the child's best welfare at heart.
"Part of what we're doing is trying to change that perspective by offering things that include the community, but actively soliciting this involvement in something more meaningful than a bake sale or a chocolate sale—something that will actually impact how their son or daughter feels at school.
"The other thing is that I feel all children have a right to see themselves reflected in the school. Kids should come to school and feel like it's their school. Indian students have not felt that public schools are their schools—rather, it's a place they go that's very different from their home and community, a place that sometimes tells them things that are in direct conflict with what they're being taught within their community or family context. So there's a dissonance that they experience as a young child, a disequilibrium that may grow into conflict at the adolescent stage. We're looking at trying to provide a supportive environment for students who feel disenfranchised and for families that feel disconnected and devalued.
"Funds of knowledge that Indian people have are just beginning to be valued. They weren't valued in the past, and people were told, 'Those aren't worth anything, you need to let them go.' It was the assimilationist idea that was common educational practice for generations. We're trying to reverse that. We're saying, 'These funds of knowledge are important. They're part of the literacy of an American citizen.' That literacy level is really low. Indian people are still probably the least understood minority group in America. There are still huge misunderstandings.
"Some of a culturally congruent education is representing kids so they feel like, 'This is my school. This school values and respects who I am, my family, my history, and some of my perspectives, and is willing to share some of my stories.' It's presenting a balanced perspective so that children are offered a broader picture of the world and a more inclusive curriculum. That's an obligation that the school has. Educators have an ethical obligation to offer their students the broadest perspective that they can, because children are going to create their own learning. We shouldn't be pouring it out—giving them a dish of it. We should be facilitating. We're mediating between the child and the learning opportunity, hopefully in the best way possible with that child's interest at heart.
"When we're doing life science and talking about trees, we talk about tribal forestry and local tree species. I think it's great to learn about the Amazon rain forest, but wouldn't it be nice if kids could go outside and show you a lodgepole pine, a Ponderosa pine, a Douglas fir, and explain the intergenerational impact of local land-use practices?
"So it's an interdisciplinary curriculum that provides an historic context for understanding Indian people today, that we're still here, we have a (tribal) government, we're involved in managing natural resources. One of the things that draws people here, the pristine environment, is the result of tribal management, of stewardship of the environment. The tribe has taken a leadership role in environmental law. The Salish and Kootenai tribes were the first to establish a wilderness area. The reservation has a cleaner water standard than the state—that's an advantage that people here share whether they're Indian or non-Indian. The school district participates in the annual "River Honoring," where the tribes host 1,000 kids for two loops along the Flathead River, with eight stations on each loop. The kids do everything from writing to art to hard sciences—measuring and testing water, looking at land management and riparian zones, identifying native and exotic fish species. The elders go down and talk about the historical and cultural significance of the river.
"The tribe has incredibly rich resources to offer schools for learning. Schools are just beginning to see in the Indian community an asset rather than a deficit. That's what we had hoped—that rather than tolerance, we would look at celebration."
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