Native Americans in the School System: Family, Community, and Academic Achievement

Carol Ward examines persistent dropout rates among Native American youth, which remain high despite overall increases in Native adult education attainment in the last twenty years. Focusing on the experiences of the Northern Cheyenne nation, she evaluates historical, ethnographic, and quantitative data to determine the causes of these educational failures, and places this data in an economic, political, and cultural context. She shows that the rate of failure in this community is the result of c…