Tinkering Toward Sovereignty: Organizational Hypocrisy and Framing in Federal Indian Schooling Policy, 2011–2014

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Critiquing Colonial Frameworks and Indigenous Resistance

Abstract

Indigenous students have long been targets of aggressive assimilation through formal schooling. Indigenous students attend deplorably ill-equipped schools with unstable staffing, and are consistently on the wrong side of the achievement gap. U.S. Native American education policy simultaneously endorses two policy streams: human capital, high stakes, and tribal sovereignty. I use the concept of organizational hypocrisy and Critical Policy Frame Analysis to interrogate the discursive indicators of Washington’s systematic privileging of mainstream policy at the expense of its commitment to tribalizing education. Holding the USG accountable for its policy decoupling is a means of forging more just and authentic schooling for all public-school students.

Author

• Erin O'Brien, University of Massachusetts - Boston