NCLB Seen Impeding Indigenous-Language Preservation
Native American leaders pressed members of Congress and federal education officials this week to provide relief from provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act that they see as obstacles to running the language-immersion schools they need to keep their languages from disappearing.
As part of a two-day national summit here on revitalizing native languages, three founders of immersion schools that are teaching children Cherokee, Ojibwe, and Native Hawaiian contended that some No Child Left Behind provisions present huge hurdles for language-immersion programs or schools and conflict with schooling rights spelled out in another federal law, the Native American Languages Act. That 1990 law says it is U.S. policy to “encourage and support the use of Native American languages as a medium of instruction.”
In a face-to-face interaction at the summit, the founders of immersion schools petitioned Charles P. Rose, the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Education, to give them a legal interpretation that exempts their schools from having to meet provisions of the NCLB law that require them to test their students in English, particularly in the early grades, and ensure that...
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