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Currently, there are 565 federally recognized tribes in the United States who are independent sovereign nations. These tribes have varying capacities to manage and administer child welfare programs. Most provide some type of child welfare service to the children and families within their tribal land. However, there are no national resources to document the number of children in foster care or the extent of abuse and neglect in the families served by tribal child welfare agencies. Information is only known about those Native American/Alaska Native families and children who are reported to state child protection agencies. Native American children represented 0.9% of all children in the United States in the late 1990s, but they comprised 3.1% of the substitute care population in state-run child welfare systems (Morrison, et al., 2010). Incident rates of child welfare referrals, substantiated referrals, and foster care placement among Native American children and families are relatively high compared to other ethnic groups (Earle & Cross, 2001) but precise interpretation of Native American status is difficult due to variations in child welfare reporting systems (Magruder & Shaw, 2008).

There is a seductive \"commonsense\" logic to two opinion pieces that have appeared over the last two years in the \"Speaking My Mind\" section of \"English Journal\": (1) Byung-In Seo's \"Defending the Five-Paragraph Essay,\" which appeared in the November 2007 issue; and (2) Kerri Smith's \"In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay,\" which appeared in March 2006. These two educators are not merely giving their personal views but, the authors would argue, are also speaking the minds of many teachers. They speak a logic that is important to challenge precisely because this logic perpetuates the commonsense myth that the five-paragraph theme is an actual \"form,\" and that \"forming\" in writing is simply slotting information into prefabricated formulas rather than a complex process of meaning-making and negotiation between a writer's purposes and audiences' needs. In this article, the authors express their concern as for \"what\" the five-paragraph essay teaches students and with \"what\" the five-paragraph essay does \"not\" teach them; with what students learn to do by writing in this format and with what students will \"not\" learn because of the continued persistence of this mythic form. The authors' concern is for the students who are subjected to this form and spend their intellectual lives constrained by its insistence. (Contains 4 notes.)

[...]most students spend their academic lives appearing disorganized to their teachers and structur- ing their thoughts into pre- fabricated formats. First Things First, But Not Necessarily in That Order4: The Problem of Efficiency Teachers using the logic of Smith and Seo see the five-paragraph theme as the starting point; once students learn this structure, they can then move on, become creative, and develop more sophisticated ways to get organized. [...]rather than teach writing, the teach- ers spend weeks closely monitoring and efficiently requiring students to write topic sentences with two supporting examples, slot in transitional devices, and decorate paragraphs with vocabulary words. Because of the intense pressures from the testing industry, teach- ers believe that they are required to provide constant structure, scaffolding every aspect of the writing process for students, from the num- ber of sentences per para- graph to the inserting of transition words. Teacher consultants Shana Woodward (Gardner-Webb University), Jeanie Reynolds (UNC Greensboro), Karen Haag (UNC Charlotte), Karen Mach (Central Piedmont Community College), Mary Kendrick (North Mecklenburg High School), Anthony Iannone (Nathanial Alexander Elementary), and Lacy Manship (Newell Elementary) contributed to the essay's exploration and development with their classroom stories and research.