The impact of high‐stakes accountability policies on Native American learners: evidence from research

Comprehension and content: planning literacy in low socioeconomic and culturally diverse schools

“…Whether we begin from cognitive, developmental or sociocultural models of reading, it is axiomatic that instruction mindfully engage with the prior knowledge and experience, interactional patterns, and the variable needs of a culturally and linguistically diverse cohort of students-in effect, building spaces for the connection of known to new discourses, tools and discourse practices. Yet culturally based reading comprehension and critical literacy instruction has received little policy endorsement despite an extensive qualitative literature over three decades that has documented local efficacy (e.g., Au 1993;McNaughton 2002;McCarty 2009;Nixon et al 2009;Janks 2010). Instead, the current push to improve scores on high stakes assessment is leading many of the low socioeconomic schools that we work in to stress strategy-based approaches to comprehension that have a stand alone status in relation to curriculum content in key learning areas other than English.…”

Ngā Whanaketanga: Minimising contradictions and maximising opportunities for teacher learning

“…Understanding how the Whanaketanga sit in relation to the curriculum and teaching is particularly significant, not only for Māori medium teachers and Māori medium school leaders, but also for those working at governmental and policy levels. This understanding may help to avoid the standards-centric and assessment-centric views that other countries have engaged in and to avoid punitive sanctions taken against schools and teachers who fail to ensure their students meet the standard or pass the test (McCarty, 2009;Wyman et al, 2010). Better understanding may also help to avoid situations where schools and teachers manipulate or narrow curriculum implementation in the classroom in order to "teach to the test".…”

“…Whanaketanga might also be seen as an acknowledgement of how pressure in other countries to devote instructional time to knowledge and skills tested in English only has been at the expense of indigenous languages and indigenous cultural teaching and learning (Beaulieu, Sparks, & Alonzo, 2005;McCarty, 2009;Romero-Little, 2006).…”

Transborder Indigenous Education: Survivance and Border Thinking in the Professional Development and Practice of Maestros Indigenas

“…Latin American nation-states with large Indigenous populations are often recipients of international development funding whereby Eurocentric, standardized education and evaluation are prioritized as remidies to high rates of poverty and minority language use (Johnson, 2010;Walsh, 2013). The contradiction of sending Indigenous educators to learn from the sociopolitical context of U.S. education, where Indigenous students are the least served by educational institutions, and the most at risk of academic failure (Brayboy & Maaka, 2011;McCarty, 2009), and Mexican-American/Latinx students experience high rates of school marginalization (Pearl, 2011), was rarely, if ever, acknowledged by foreign aid funding personnel or funding discourse.…”