Kara Bobroff is the founding principal of Native American Community Academy, a pioneering school in Albuquerque that grew from an entire community speaking up about what kind of school it wanted. Now in its 13th year, NACA is expanding within New Mexico and nationally as the “NACA Inspired” Schools Network. Ashoka’s Simon Stumpf caught up with Bobroff to learn more about what makes this model unique and effective for Indigenous students and what it can teach us all.
Simon Stumpf: Take us back to the beginning in 2005. What were you were trying to do and how did you get started?
Kara Bobroff: With NACA we wanted to reclaim and reimagine education for Native American students in particular -- our language, culture, and identity had been taken out and predetermined ideas about where our students should fit in the overall structure of the country had been baked in. After all, the American education system was designed specifically for one purpose, and that was to assimilate and produce workers for an industrial economy.
So we started by asking our community: what do we, do you, want to see for our Native American young people? More than one hundred partners started sharing their experiences from their own education: what worked, what didn't work. We learned of everything from low academic expectations to lack of cultural awareness to institutionalized and overt racism. Then we asked: what’s your greatest hope, what do you want to see change?
Stumpf: That’s powerful. What’s the result – what does a NACA student today experience on a given school day?
Bobroff: About 90% of the day is grounded in Indigenous perspectives and that applies across subjects. Students read Indigenous writers and learn a native language -- Lakota, Navajo, Tewa, Zuni, or Keres. Even science concepts are brought into focus through Indigenous examples. And to broaden students’ understanding of their identity, many juniors and seniors do an exchange with one of our sister schools in New Zealand. Throughout, students are encouraged to reflect on their own wellness, growth, and development -- this is a strength for our schools and network, I’d say.
Stumpf: Your school is about supporting students to be leaders. How do you foster leadership?
Bobroff: As with everything else, we ground it in our culture. This means exploring how Indigenous leadership connects to our core values. We look at tribal governments in relation to federal and state governments, and different types of leadership models. Student success ultimately means growing as a changemaker in your community: engaging with problems you want to correct, and dreams you want to bring to life. We’ve had kids create documentaries, take on issues like violence against women, champion voting, and much more.
Stumpf: You’re leading the effort to start NACA-inspired schools across the country. How is that going?
Bobroff: This work has really taken off, honestly. In 2014, we formalized the network and now we have seven schools in New Mexico and we're working with four communities in Oklahoma and three in the Dakotas.
Almost immediately after NACA was set up, neighboring communities reached out to ask, "How can we start NACA in our community?" This prompted us to start a teacher training and fellowship so people could spend time at our school to learn what it takes to start or transform a school. Because we deeply believe that it needs to come from the community, we work with fellows and their teams to take their learning back home and translate it in a way that makes the best sense for them.
As the network grows, we're learning how critical it is for teachers to access and support other teachers, so we connect them through a summer institute, and also help them visit each others' classrooms -- we’re piloting a tech platform that allows this virtually which brings the cost way down. We also have an online hub with all sorts of lesson plans from across the network on a range of topics, like how to indigenize a science class, a Humanities class, and an AP curriculum. This is all thanks to the generosity of all the teachers who share what they use as curriculum and participate and give each other feedback.
Stumpf: Today in the U.S. the majority of children age 5 and under are non-white. Do you see NACA as contributing to the national conversation about student diversity and school reform?
Bobroff: Yes. Here in New Mexico, Native American students, English language learners, and students with an exceptionality make up 72% of all students. As we look around the country and think about the next 20 years, the big demographic shifts mean more states will have student populations like ours today. What do they want to see in education? It's very, very different from what we have currently designed it for. We are setting up NACA Inspired Schools to contribute best practices in school design and community integration.
Stumpf: You invite the communities you work with to share their greatest hopes. What’s your biggest hope?
Bobroff: I want all students to be healthy, cared-for, respected, and to know that they are on a path of success for sure and that they can contribute to positive change. I also want everyone to contribute to the school design and vision -- whether you're a student, family member, educator, community leader, business leader, tribal leader, government leader -- everybody has to be on board to make schools work. In the end, communities know what they want, they know their values and strengths, and school design can naturally flow from this.
Kara Bobroff is a 2018 Ashoka Fellow. Read more about Ashoka innovators in the United States here.
