Authors
Emery Roberts, Ph.D. student, Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut
ORCID 0009-0009-3369-2959
Abstract
Montana’s Indian Education for All (IEFA) has been favorably examined as an effective multicultural education reform throughout its two decades of implementation. However, an ongoing lawsuit raised by a coalition of Montana parents and Tribal governments against the state board of education and subsequent revisions to IEFA have exposed questions about the program's efficacy. In this paper, I present a case study and policy analysis of the revisions Montana House Bill 338 introduces to IEFA and seek to understand the recent critiques of IEFA given its largely favorable presence within the literature on multicultural education. I analyze key legal documents and the past research done on multicultural education in Montana through a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) lens. Additionally, I address the Yellow Kidney v. Montanatrial to better contextualize contemporary Native American activism and involvement in state education policy. In so doing, I center a critique of “aspirational” multicultural education, a tokenistic approach that delays the goals of critical multicultural education and decolonizing action. This delay underscores a broader issue wherein Indigenous classroom knowledge and expertise in public-school settings is frequently situated in non-Native teaching staff. Finally, I explore the ability of teacher-centered reforms to meaningfully address structural inequities.
