Sorry! I am feeling uppity today because our teacher's union's case at the labor relations board is--ugh. I don't even want to talk about it.
"You will need a sea change in culture and families to fix these communities," sounds like if we simply force these minority communities to have the same values as us, getting their test scores to be as high as ours will be no problem. Well, that may be true, but it may not be a realistic goal, or an ethical one.
Benjamin Franklin's account of a 1744 Iroquois speech at a council with the government of Virginia
Quoted in Blaisdell, Bob, ed. (2000) Great Speeches by Native Americans, Dover Thrift Editions.
Beckee, I really appreciate your sympathy, but I think you are misinformed.
Lets examine literacy among the native tribes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SequoyahThis was the only time in recorded history that a member of an illiterate people independently created an effective writing system.[1][4] After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate rapidly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.[1]
Pretty stunning, huh? Not only did an Indian invent writing, he did a Daniel Webster on the dictionary side, made printing presses, taught others in his tribe, who then wrote newspapers and translated books And they became far more literate than their white neighbors and built a very modern nation in the span of just one generation. There really is no precedent for what Sequoyah or the Cherokee did.
There times that I wonder what the average IQ of those original tribes were and what Sequoyah's was. I'd bet it was close to 120 as a whole and 180+ for him.
As for your original topic.
I am part Apache and Cherokee. My sister is married to a Choctaw. I grew up in Oklahoma where just about everyone is part Indian.
Thank goodness I look white to most people or I cannot imagine how much worse things would have been in school for me.
Instead of me not being allowed to go to the library because I was too young, I could be kept from the library because it would be "unethical."
