By Jonathan Butcher
American Indian students are more likely to live in poverty and face unemployment later in life. These children carry the burdens of geographic isolation and multi-generational poverty that are heavy to lift.
In my conversations with state leaders on ways to help students in chronically failing schools—ideas such as expanding eligibility for education savings accounts and allowing parents to petition to convert a failing school to a charter school—policymakers regularly cite the unique challenges presented by American Indian students.
Digital and online learning opportunities offer hope. As Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips explains in his new Policy Brief, Digital Learning: Improve Educational Opportunities for American Indian Students, online programs can be made available to any student and would increase educational opportunities in rural areas and on reservations.
Over 300,000 American Indians from 21 tribes call Arizona home, and American Indian students comprise 5 percent of the state’s K-12 population. These students score well below their white peers on the nation’s report card, often lagging behind other minority groups such as African American and Hispanic students. Among 4th graders, 70 percent of American Indian students score below the basic level. Only 8 percent can read at grade level.
Lips’ Policy Brief explains how policymakers can incorporate blended-learning programs into the classroom; provide a specific option for children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools to allow them to enroll in Arizona Online Instruction classes; expand private school choice programs to offer full or partial scholarships to American Indian students to enroll in virtual school courses; and create a Federal Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) Virtual School.
Reasonable people can disagree about what’s best for American Indians in the 21st century. But everyone agrees that more quality educational choices for children of any heritage are worth pursuing.
Jonathan Butcher is the Education Director for the Goldwater Institute.
Learn more:
Goldwater Institute: Digital Learning: Improved Educational Opportunities for American Indian Students
Arizona Department of Education: 2007 Indian Education Annual Report
Arizona Republic: Arizona’s American Indians
Beating the digital learning drum again! Let’s go over it one more time:
Digital education and online learning generate huge profits. Follow the money.
He who controls digital and online learning has the ability to politically indoctrinate children in a surreptitious manner.
Entities with Liberal associations, like Carnegie, have already been involved in producing materials for digital and online learning.
Digital and online learning make it more difficult for parents to monitor what their children are being exposed to as the content is not in the form of a book.
As regards digital and online learning, the U. S. is not leading, it’s following. Furthermore is it following the failures documented in the U. K. over six years ago:
“Pupils make more progress in 3Rs ‘without aid of computers’ ”
“The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1486108/Pupils-make-more-progress-in-3Rs-without-aid-of-computers.html
The Goldwater Institute advocates having the U. S. replicate the six year old educational failures of the U. K.. Whose side is the Goldwater Institute on regarding the ability of the American youth of today to compete internationally tomorrow?