Language discrimination
English proficiency not a black & white issue in Indian Country

Ganado Primary School second-grade teacher Flora Quahi reads the book "North Pole South Pole" to her students on Wednesday afternoon at the school. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Karen Francis
Diné Bureau

Students in the Ganado Primary School's Dine` Studies class raise their hands on Wednesday as the class was brainstorming about water pollution. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

GANADO — An Arizona state mandate going into effect next school year will require all public schools to teach four hours of English a day to students who are not proficient in English — a requirement that could have far-reaching effects for schools on Navajo.

In the Ganado Unified School District alone, 886 out of approximately 1,800 pupils are deemed to be English-language learners.

GUSD Superintendent Deborah Jackson-Dennison said that if the mandate goes into effect, it may take students deemed to be ELL five to six years to get their high school diploma, instead of the normal four, because they will be spending the majority of their time in English class.

The Legislature voted for the mandate in 2005, with support from Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, as a response to a 1992 lawsuit dealing with funding for English instruction. There are approximately 135,000 students classified as English-language learners in the state.

Jackson-Dennison said that students will become frustrated if the mandate is implemented at the district.

“Our drop-out rate is going to increase. Our attendance is going to decrease. Our overall graduation rate is going to decrease. We’ll never meet AYP (adequate yearly progress),” she said.

“English only should not be applied to Navajo children,” Jackson-Dennison said. “The model they are saying we have to use will hurt us more than help us.”

She added, “It’s more deep-rooted than just putting this mandate in place and either complying or not complying. It’s the very essence of discrimination and lack of understanding, ignorance toward Native American people.”

Jackson-Dennison is responding to the mandates in three ways. First, the district will begin a “Response to Intervention” program where the district will hold individualized meetings with parents of students designated as ELL and work to exit them out of the ELL label.

Second, she will be proposing to the school board that the district begin a Navajo immersion program in kindergarten so that “when kindergarten children get to the high school level, they’ll no longer be ELL. They’ll know Navajo and English.”

She asserts that based on her experience students that have gone through Navajo immersion schools or programs outscore their peers on English tests when they get to secondary schools. However, the state and Horne don’t recognize that model, she said.

“They want us to follow their model of English-only, which has never worked ever since formal education has been introduced to Indian people across the country,” Dennison-Jackson said.

The final and perhaps most important step that Jackson-Dennison is taking is advocating for the U.S. Congress to strengthen the Native American Languages Act so that states cannot apply English-only to Native American tribes.

She will be going before local chapters, the school board, the Navajo Nation’s Education Committee, and the National Indian Education Association seeking supporting documents for the effort to strengthen NALA. Other superintendents with the state’s Impact Aid Association will also bring resolutions before their school boards.

“What it would do is no other state in the country will be able to apply English-only to Native American children,” she said.

Jackson-Dennison, who is Navajo, noted that Arizona has one of the largest Native American populations in the country, “yet we’re saying English-only.”

Even while a monument to the Navajo Code Talkers was dedicated on the Arizona State Capitol grounds last week, the schools on Navajo are struggling with how they are going to implement the English language mandates.

“They’re honoring the Navajo Code Talkers and at the same time saying Navajo language is not as important as English. Yet without the Navajo language, without the Code Talkers, they would not even be here today,” she said.