American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students regularly face obstacles during the transition to high school and have the highest dropout rate of all U.S. racial and ethnic groups. Educational theorists and researchers have various explanations for this high failure rate, each with its own prescriptions. These explanations include: (1) deficit theory focused on presumed "deficits" of individuals and families; (2) organizational theories focused on structure and practices of schools and school systems; (3) critical theory, emphasizing powerful economic and political structures that create winners and losers; (4) sociolinguistics, examining miscommunication between students and teachers from different cultures; and (5) cultural difference theories that focus on teacher adaptations of curriculum and methods to student needs. The idea of cultural discontinuity between home (or community) and school contains elements of the latter two explanations, and suggests that minority group children may have to choose between school and home cultures. School failure may be actively pursued in order to preserve the student's culture of origin. Two case studies contrast the failure of Canadian Sioux students who transferred from a reservation school to a city high school, with the success of Alaska Native students in small village high schools. Addressing discontinuity via culturally relevant curriculum is only a partial solution. Other concerns for AI/AN students are large schools, uncaring or untrained faculty, passive teaching methods, inappropriate testing, student retention, tracking, lack of parental involvement, and high transfer rate between schools. (SV)