Gov. Linda Lingle and state Department of Education Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto recently co-signed a memorandum of agreement committing Hawai'i to participate with other states in adopting a "common core" of national education standards.

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan supports such standards and recently testified that "education is the civil rights issue of our generation, the only truly effective weapon in our nation's long war on poverty." A recent editorial in The Honolulu Advertiser (June 3) urged the adoption of such national standards, but cautioned that we must first take a "good, hard look" to make sure such an approach "makes sense" before we leap to adopt them.

This "good, hard look" must be framed by the civil rights implications of adopting standards that make inaccurate assumptions about the Native Hawaiian children we're educating, and that undervalue the culture, language and history of our native people. They also must be framed by an understanding of what works both in terms of the content and context through which this education process occurs.

The national move toward common standards is rushing forward with several templates already vying for adoption. The English language-arts standards of one of them, Achieve's "American Diploma Project," claims that among the things all American students should know by the end of high school are what it calls "foundational works of American literature" like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and "the meaning of common idioms, as well as literary, classical and biblical allusions."

Before the Hawai'i state DOE adopts such standards for our keiki, we have the civil right to ask, from whose literature do these "common idioms" come? Whose literature is being ignored? And whose history determines what is considered "classical?" We believe Queen Lili'uokalani's response to the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by armed Americans is as much a "foundational" text of American history as the Gettysburg Address. Hawai'i's children need to study both.

We are deeply committed to the success of all of Hawai'i's keiki in all areas of learning, including English language arts and math, the subjects for which national standards initially are being proposed.

But we believe that Native Hawaiian students in particular may be harmed by the imposition of a cookie-cutter approach to standards that are not culturally and linguistically aligned with the values and practices of Native Hawaiians.

Native Hawaiian educators have worked diligently over the past several decades to develop innovative Hawaiian-culture-based programs and schools. Evidence-based research shows that Native Hawaiian children learn better — and perform significantly better on standardized reading and math tests — when they are taught through an indigenous educational lens. As The Advertiser noted in 2006, "Native Hawaiian students tend to show greater gains in standardized tests when they attend Hawaiian-focused charter schools rather than standard public schools," according to a Kamehameha Schools study.

And importantly, Hawaiian keiki in culture-based programs tend to be much more engaged in their education than their peers, as noted by the fact that they are five times less likely to be excessively absent from school than are Hawaiian students who don't participate in these programs.

As a community of educators, we have developed academically rigorous, culturally responsive curriculum and instructional methods that complement Hawaiian ways of knowing, that have revitalized our Native Hawaiian language, that will prepare students to be responsible and resilient adults, and that will enable our students to create a sustainable and culturally diverse world.

National standards developed with the promise of increased American productivity alone and that are not aligned with the values, language, culture, communities and history of the students being educated is shortsighted and may literally destroy the best of what Native Hawaiians have to offer the world.

Important lessons for the future emerge from broader perspectives that include Hawaiian history, Hawaiian culture, and the time-tested methods of survival and social organization that enabled Native Hawaiians to thrive in the most isolated islands in the world for centuries before "America" was even a dream.

We must fully engage ourselves in these fast-moving conversations, so that the collective vision of our future will encompass not only the spirit of the immigrants and their descendants who settled and formed the United States of America, but also of our first citizens, the native peoples of this land.

Colin Kippen is the executive director of the Native Hawaiian Education Council. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser on behalf of the council.