Missing teachers
According to the Minnesota Department of Education, 250 – less than a half percent – of the state’s roughly 55,880 teachers are American Indian. Native children make up more than 2 percent of all students.
The number of native teachers has slipped in recent years, even as the overall ranks of teachers have grown. Ten years ago, 290 of 55,200 teachers in the state were American Indian.
In North Dakota, native teachers make up less than
3 percent of the state’s 9,000 teachers – compared to roughly 10 percent of students who are American Indian.
When some Mahnomen, Minn., residents rallied earlier this year to protest the departure of Principal Susan Ninham, from the White Earth Reservation school, they decried the scarcity of native role models in the district.
Superintendent Jon Kringen says native job applicants are simply few and far between. Last summer, the candidates for five teaching openings included just one native applicant. At Waubun High, Principal Helen Kennedy counted three native applicants for the 16 openings the school filled in her seven years in the district.
The shortage is a function of the achievement gap between native and white students, says Minnesota Department of Education Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown. In Minnesota, 65 percent of native students graduate from high school compared to almost 95 of their white peers, and the native college graduation rate fell through the 2000s.
“We have a limited pool of American Indian graduates, and education is not the only field competing for those students,” says Brown.
When Waubun Elementary teacher Renee Krebsbach polls her third-grade pupils about their dream jobs, they bring up doctor, engineer, lawyer and, yes, teacher. Over at the high school, Rock’s students write essays on their career aspirations; professional athlete, nurse and mechanic are popular picks.
No teachers.
“I think self-esteem has a lot to do with it,” Krebsbach. “When I see them in the third grade, they think they can be teachers. Later on they start thinking that they aren’t college material.”
Special skills
Krebsbach keeps classroom supplies in birch bark containers, and gently corrects students when they call powwow regalia a “costume.” As she cultivates curiosity about native heritage, she weeds out stereotypes.
She has an obvious starting point: The daughter of a white man and an Ojibwe woman, she is blond and blue-eyed. “Indian people can look any way, and they can be anything they want to be,” she tells them.
Few educators disagree students need talented teachers, regardless of race.
“Our hiring philosophy is you hire the most qualified candidate for the job at the time,” says Mahnomen’s Kringen. “I think American Indian teachers do the same job as everybody else. Maybe our students find it easier to relate to them, I’m not sure.”
When Rock’s students complain about the shortage of native teachers, he points out he turned out fine with one native teacher in his years of schooling and asks, “Do you really think if you had Indian teachers, you’d do better?”
But many education leaders believe students might well do better if teaching staffs were more diverse. Boosting the ranks of native teachers is among the Minnesota Education Department’s top strategies to narrow the achievement gap, Brown says.
Native teachers bring valuable cultural understanding to the classroom. They know native students are more likely to listen than raise their hand in class, and they know how to engage them, says Sitting Bull College Education Chairwoman Kathryn Froelich. They tone down the spirit of competition that can grip mainstream classrooms and confound collaboration- centric native students.
“American Indian teachers can show some of the kids who don’t have hope that they can be successful in school and in higher education,” says Waubun High’s Kennedy. “They take away the excuses sometimes.”
Jeri LaRoque, an English teacher at Turtle Mountain Community High in North Dakota, prides herself on busting excuses.
At her own high school graduation, she had plenty of reasons to question a dream of becoming a teacher. All her teachers were white. No one in her family had gone to college. She didn’t have a car to zip off to campus, and like most of her peers, she felt she belonged on the reservation.
So she married and raised four children. In her 30s, she started taking night and weekend college classes, reluctantly skipping her children’s ball games to attend. “I know where students are coming from because I’ve been there,” she says. “I tell them if I did it, anybody can.”
Breaking the cycle
LaRoque’s school district boasts a concentration of native teachers virtually unheard of in Minnesota – more than 60 percent of teachers are native.
Turtle Mountain Assistant Superintendent Roman Marcellais says the district, whose students are overwhelmingly native, has tapped into great relationships with state colleges. It offers the state’s top teacher pay, more than $7,000 a year higher than the state average.
But most importantly, says Marcellais, the district has broken a native education vicious cycle over the years: The more American Indian teachers have joined the staff, the more likely students have become to consider college – and a teaching career in particular. According to the district, 80 percent of graduates go off to college.
At Red Lake Schools, administration encourages support staff, who are almost exclusively native, to go back to school and return to teach. It encourages teachers to turn bright students on to teaching, as they sometimes do to more lucrative careers. “Rarely do I hear, ‘You’ll make an outstanding math teacher,’ ” Superintendent Brent Gish says. “We need to raise the profession up.”
The Minnesota teacher gap
Whereas in North Dakota, the majority of native teachers work for districts with predominantly native student populations, in Minnesota most American Indian teaching graduates head to the Twin Cities and other larger districts, where native students are often a tiny fraction of the student population.
This past school year, according to Department of Education data, the Mahnomen School District, where more than 60 percent of students are native, employed three American Indian teachers. The St. Paul district, where 2 percent of students are native, employed 60 American Indian teachers.
Yvonne Novack, who headed the Indian Education Office at the Minnesota Education Department until recently, said she regularly fielded calls from Twin Cities districts looking for leads on soon-to-be graduates of the state’s four college programs training native teachers.
“As soon as these students graduate, they get snapped up by St. Paul and Minneapolis,” she says.
Although reservation districts have a hard time competing, they can learn from the larger districts’ proactive approach, says Red Lake Superintendent Brent Gish. He says districts should develop relationships with college education programs and encourage students to come back and teach.
Readers can reach Forum reporter Mila Koumpilova at (701) 241-5529