Their verbal skills and their lifestyles are very different. A woman who taught on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming reported her students blank expressions when a test asked them to rank several indicators of wealth a diamond, a mansion, and a yacht. She had to explain what a mansion and a yacht were, and the students understandably had no idea which was the most valuable. When she asked them to define wealth, they said, Having enough to eat. Having a house to live in.
Students use their local dialects rather than the mainstream dialect of English.
Even when teachers want to help, the system is set up to put children into special education if they are not performing at their grade level, according to Dauphinais. Special education was intended to provide a safety net for students with disabilities who might otherwise fall through the cracks of the school system. However, scholars such as Thomas Skrtic believe that the special education system instead serves as a safety valve for schools that don t know how to adequately serve diverse students. He believes most K-12 administrators have been trained to run a school as a rationally organized machine. Labeling certain students and removing them from the classroom helps maintain order, according to Skrtic s article in the Harvard Educational Review, which is quoted in the Resource Guide in this issue.