LING 612 Making Assessment Practices Valid for Indigenous American Students S. Nelson-Barber & E. Trumbull (2007)

When I read this article I was pleasantly surprised to see the similarity between the article's concept and our place-based education philosophy we have right here in Russian Mission, Alaska!! I think like the ultimate purpose of the standardized test goals of the US educational system is to create test questions that typical next door neighbor people can answer. Everyone down states knows that candy don't come to the village from the "post office." Kids here are so cute, when I ask them where did they get their new clothes or their snow racers, they respond, "My dad and my mom got it from the post office." I asked, "oh, does the post office have a store there?" They respond, "no, it come with Jim's truck." Can you imagine the reaction that someone from the test administrator's office would have with that response? I just smile because I know that they they all know that we get most of our stuff from...Walmart. Ha ha.
Having the place-based education here in Russian Mission started when we decided as a whole community with all the entities involved to fix our low level of literacy in our community. We decided as a whole group to get students reading by investing in culturally relevant books and having students learn about their culture in the classroom and making that the focus of the curriculum in the school. With lots of sweat and dedication by the whole group, we are able to raise our reading and writing scores to 60% based on the AYP percentage of how our school is doing. With that score, we have not AYP this year, but I think it is still pretty good, because that is way higher than 20% from the past assessments in reading and writing. By the way, our math score is in that same percentage as well.
I think it is about time that the country is realizing that no matter what the curriculum focuses on and how much time is needed to get students proficient in the basics, we can still get there and have our students proud of who they are and that they know their hertiage and be proud of themselves, instead of having a label that is stamped on their school record that says, "Limited English Proficient." Instead have a stamp that states, "Proud."