Best practices: a cross-site evaluation.

For well over a century, there have been boarding schools for American Indian children. During the last decades, the long history of these boarding schools has increasingly come under the review of historians and social scientists. The reviews making the biggest splash focused on those boarding schools having misguided policies or run by incompetent administrators. But often overlooked in these post-hoc assessments of boarding schools is the complexity of the issues they have faced and continue to face. There are no perfect boarding schools that have gotten everything “right,” just as there are no other perfect social organizations. The situation each boarding school faces is complex; each has achieved some sort of functional equilibrium of key factors which form a unique constellation: staff, administration, resources, programs, current state and federal policy, community of location, communities of origin, families, and tribes. The unique configuration that makes up each boarding school’s environment attempts to meet the needs of as many students as possible, and tries to maximize positive outcomes. Recognizing that there is room for improvement, the Office of Indian Education Programs (OIEP) provided several years of funding to a group of schools in order to enhance their services to children. Respecting the diversity of the schools, the OIEP invited boarding schools to submit proposals that enhanced their extant strengths and linked “clinicians, counselors, and mental health professionals with academic program personnel in a culturally sensitive residential program tailored to the particular needs of Indian students” in order “to achieve positive changes in attitudes, behavior and academic performance of Indian youth attending boarding schools.” (Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994). The selected boarding schools were provided Therapeutic Residential Model (TRM) funding to carry out their proposals. To determine each site’s accomplishments as well as the efficacy of this approach, the OIEP concurrently implemented a cross-site evaluation. The evaluation was designed to (1) provide a record and evaluation of the characteristics of each site’s environment prior to funding, (2) document the course of planning and implementation of changes during TRM funding, (3) collect data on incoming students and outcome data agreed upon by all sites, (4) provide ongoing analyses of the data to the sites so that administrators could make program changes, and (5) use process and outcome data from these diverse sites to draw cross-site conclusions. Retention is the clearest and most basic indicator of success in a boarding school because it represents the convergence of a number of factors: the ability of the system to meet the particular needs of each child, the capacity of the system to stabilize children emotionally and to socialize them into acceptable behavior patterns, the comfort level of children with the environment provided, and parents’ perception that staying in the system is in the best interests of their children. Conversely, major reasons why children leave the system are homesickness, belief that they are needed at home, failure to adjust to the demands of the system, perturbation of the system to the extent that it rejects them, and removal by parents who need them at home or are either unhappy with or unimpressed by what the system has to offer. Simply put, high retention means that the system is working for the students entrusted to its care. Two of the 5 sites involved in the TRM program achieved high levels of retention; one did so in the years prior to TRM funding, and the other site made impressive gains during the study. Section 1 of this cross-site evaluation identifies the factors that were common to sites that achieved high retention, and it describes the prevailing situation at those sites that were not successful at retaining students.