I recently saw the future of Indian schools and it was amazing. Students in
the district have improved from having test scores averaging in the bottom
quartile in 1994 to having all test scores in 2002 averaging in the top
quartile. I maintain that any Indian school can do the same thing. If it
wants to.

The future is being built by a small school district in Alaska that is now
unbelievably good. The superintendent Richard DeLorenzo, has already won
the highest award within the U.S. for the vast improvements the school has
made.

Indian students are extremely bright. Chugach is just one of several
schools that are proving that. The others, including Mount Edgecumbe High
School, Wellpinit School District, Navajo Preparatory School, White Swan
High School, Choctaw High School, Rock Point High School, St. Michael High
School, Santa Fe Indian School, and Salmon River Central Schools, are
destroying the myth of the dumb Indian.

The myth was never true, but unfortunately, most people working in Indian
schools believed it is true. There are currently 740 Indian high schools.
The ten schools that have upgraded their programs in the past decade and a
half are leading the way.

All we need to do is convince the other 730 school principals and
superintendent to follow the blueprint of Chugach.

President Bush presented Mr. DeLorenzo with the Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award last year in a considerable ceremony in the White House.
Afterward, the President graciously consented to meet Mr. DeLorenzo's
mother and shake her hand.

DeLorenzo says he bought his first suit for the occasion. In the normal
course of running the 22,000 square mile district, he has no reason to wear
a suit. He has spent his whole career working in Indian schools, and has
made enormous progress.

By winning such a prestigious award, Richard DeLorenzo ranks as one of the
most admired educators in the United States.

They have had to restructure the school district, and put a person in
charge of the training and other developments that have happened to them
post-Baldrige. (The award, by the way, is named after the late Secretary of
Commerce in the Reagan administration. This is its eighteenth year.)

For instance, on a recent trip to Albuquerque, he made one speech in
Seattle the day before. He then made a keynote speech for Catching the
Dream and did a workshop.

The next day he was a keynote speaker for the New Mexico Quality Awards
conference. The day after that he keynoted for the California Council for
Excellence in Los Angeles.

In that one trip he made five presentations in four days. We had Richard as
a keynote speaker at our Eighth Annual Exemplary Institute just before the
Gathering of Nations in April. He drove the people crazy.

We received 53 evaluation forms on his presentation, and 33 of them said he
was perfect. They gave him a score of 55 out of 55 possible points.

In other words, they thought he could walk on water. He was very
impressive, in fact so impressive he took my breath away. I practically
cried when I had to conclude the session at the end of his speech. He is
extremely powerful.

One of my bosses, the actress Lindsay Wagner ("The Bionic Woman") had
introduced the program that morning. "That's the first time I have ever
seen you speechless," she told me when I sat back down with her.

Chugach School District is southeast of Anchorage on the Prince William
Sound. Most of us remember the huge oil spill that happened at Valdez when
the tanker ruptured. That spill was within the school district.

In addition to having the best fishing in the world, the area is populated
by widely dispersed Native villages. Many of them are accessible only by
dog sled or airplane during the winter months.

The people are poor. Unemployment is 52.3%. Three-quarters (75.7%) of the
population of mostly Aleuts and Anglos are below the poverty level. The
population is 50% Alaskan Native. Over 90% of the students could not read
at grade level.

At that time, only one Chugach high school graduate had gone to college in
the previous 20 years. The teacher attrition rate was 50%.

Despite these "handicaps," they have transformed a dysfunctional school
into a national model of excellence in education. The other organizations
striving to win the Baldrige Award in previous years included FedEx,
General Motors, IBM, and numerous other major corporations.

Chugach won on their first try. Some of the companies have been trying to
win the award for 15 years or more.

The people at the school district realized back in 1994 that their methods
were not working. Richard was a principal at the time, and was soon
promoted to superintendent, so he has been involved with the project from
the beginning.

They began by throwing out the old curriculum, which working. In its place,
they developed a comprehensive curriculum specifying what students need to
know learn at each grade level. But it was not just teachers and
administrators who started over. Parents and students participated in the
development of the new curriculum as well.

This is one of the most valuable lessons Chugach teaches other districts.
Once the parents and students participated in the design of their own
future, they had ownership of that future, something they had never had
before. They wanted to make it work as much as the teachers did.

The most radical thing they threw out was Carnegie units. Instead of
letting time be the constant and learning be the variable, they spelled out
achievement and learning as the constant and let time be the variable.
Students spend as much time as they need to learn the material.

The curriculum they developed has ten components, at least five of which
are not found in most Indian schools. The components are reading, writing,
math, personal/social development, career development, service learning,
science, technology, social sciences, and cultural awareness and
expression.

All of them have to be taken together. I know dozens of people, for
instance, who insist and demand that their Native language be taught in
their local school. But almost none of them also demand that students learn
the basics of the basic subjects. We often go at this thing of education in
a piecemeal fashion.

Chugach did not have the money to do some of the things they wanted to do.
So they went outside to get money for these things. One of the items
included now that was not there before was technology.

Each student can now earn a laptop computer by achieving the highest level
of learning in every standard.

People often complain that they can not improve their schools because they
do not have the money. Chugach has proved them wrong.

Richard reports that much of the support for their new programs comes from
reallocation of funds, from grants, and foundation support, including the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation has put a lot of his money into helping the district
achieve its goals. The students moved from the 28th percentile in reading
to the 71st.

They went from the 35th percentile in math to the 78th. And they went from
the 26th percentile in language to the 71st.

They have proved for anyone who wants to see the results that Native
students can team and excel.

There is no magic to the system. People have to learn it. The district puts
teachers through 30 days of training each year. That's right, I said 30
days, not one or two. Teacher turnover has decreased at Chugach from 50% a
year to under 10%.

The typical new teacher at an Indian school now gets one or two days of
orientation and is thrown into classroom to sink or swim. Most of them
sink, of course.

Turnover at Indian schools nationwide now runs about 35% per year. We have
to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, my friends. There is a better way
to do it, which Chugach has shown us magnificently.

Now that the district has proved that its program can work, and work
extremely well, Richard has set his sights even higher. He is seeking to
add another 1,000 school districts, and one million students, to the world
of high achievement brought about at Chugach.

To date he has added 18 districts to his Re Inventing Schools Coalition
(RISC). They will be meeting in Anchorage August 1-2, 2003 for their first
national meeting. The Quality Schools Institute will follow immediately,
August 4-8, 2003. He wants to invite all Indian schools and other schools
that are interested in improvement to join them for the Institute. This is
a huge, exciting development.

I am just so happy to have met Richard. He is a gem, and the Chugach
methods are so wonderful. I hope more Indian parents, school board members,
and administrators start to share his dream.

Article copyright Seminole Tribe of Florida.