School as Community: The Rough Rock Demonstration

Abstract

Teresa L. McCarty takes us to Rough Rock in the center of the Navajo Reservation, and to a bold experiment in Native American ownership of education. As the first school to be run by a locally elected, all-Indian governing board, and the first to incorporate systematically the native language and culture, it proved to be an influential demonstration of community-based transformation. McCarty describes the changes in Rough Rock's social,economic, and political structures, and examines the relation of these changes to educational outcomes for children. Further, she critiques the irony created by the larger institutional structure of federal funding, which both "enables and constrains genuine control over education by Native American communities."