Say Anything Blog

Segregation was ended in America, and rightfully so, in the name of racial equality.  In Alaska, they’ve brought segregation back...in the name of racial equality.

Walk into this Bartlett High School classroom and it may seem just like any other class in Anchorage. The teacher demonstrates math problems on the white board. The students look as if they need more sleep. The room is decorated in the chaos of inspirational quotes, posters and bric-a-brac.

But look more closely and you’ll see that unlike the rest of the building where there’s a rainbow of ethnicities, in here the students are all Native. And there’s something else different about this classroom that’s not easy to see: Unlike other teachers who work for the Anchorage School District, this teacher is privately employed.

This instructor and the ones in the adjacent rooms are from Cook Inlet Tribal Council Inc. and the students they teach at Bartlett are some of Anchorage’s most at-risk of failing. The tribal nonprofit has taken on a unique role by persuading the school district to let it offer Native-only classes to tackle the problem of too many Native students falling behind or dropping out.

It is one of several efforts across the city by the district, nonprofits and tribal groups to raise the lagging test scores and high dropout rates of the district’s 4,200 Native students. Last year, 64 percent of Native students were at grade level for reading and writing, compared with the district average of 81 percent of all students. In math, 58 percent were at grade level, while the district’s average was 73 percent.

By the end of four years of high school, only a third of Natives graduate.

I understand that the intentions here are good ones, but I wonder what we’re actually solving here.  Is segregation really what’s best for these kids?  Is co-mingling with kids of other ethnicities really what’s driving them to fail?

I think the answer to both is “no.”

Segregation for the kids isn’t going to serve them well, because eventually they’re going to have to live and work (and hopefully prosper) in a world that isn’t segregated at all.  They need to learn to work with, or at least alongside, people of other ethnicities.  Not be taught to expect special treatment because of their race.

And I wonder how much that expectation of special treatment, which is clearly being created by things like this segregation, is causing these students to fail in the first place?  Like most Native Americans across the country I expect that these kids come from families and tribes that get no small amount of subsidy from the government.  Do you think that perhaps said subsidy is what’s driving their lack of desire to succeed.  Because I refuse to believe that their being Native Americans has anything to do with them being incapable of success, so why don’t they want to achieve?

Maybe because they’ve come to expect the government to take care of them.