The BIE has had 33 leaders in 35 years, making a chaotic system that has not operated efficiently for decades even worse.ĭr. Those systemic issues have produced a disjointed system that has even clogged up the delivery of required materials, including textbooks. The BIE blames its failures on “an inconsistent commitment from political leadership,” institutional, budgetary and legal barriers as well as bureaucratic red tape among federal agencies. It’s also extremely difficult to attract quality teachers willing to relocate to remote outposts with limited quality housing and extreme quality of life issues. Shannon County, where Pine Ridge is located, is the second poorest with a per capita income of just $6,000-$8,000 a year. Four of the five poorest counties in America are located on reservations. In 2011, 4th graders in the BIE scored 22 points lower in reading and 14 points lower in math on national proficiency tests than their Indian counterparts attending public schools.īIE schools are typically located in some of the poorest, most geographically isolated regions of the country. BIE students performed lower on national assessment tests than every other major urban school district other than Detroit Public Schools, the report says.īIE students also perform worse than American Indian students attending regular public schools. “Each of these challenges has contributed to poor outcomes for BIE students.”ĭuring the 2012-2013 school year, only one out of four BIE-funded schools met state-defined proficiency standards, and one out of three are under restructuring due to chronic academic failure, according to the report. “BIE has never faced more urgent challenges,” the report said. BIE-funded schools are chronically failing and “one of the lowest-performing set of schools in the country,” according to the report. In a startling new draft report released in April by the federal Bureau of Indian Education, which oversees 183 schools on 64 reservations in 23 states, the agency draws attention to its own inability to deliver a quality education to Native students. The government is starting to own up to its failures. When last year’s federal sequestration cuts kicked in, Indian country was hit first. The government often pays as much as 60% of a reservation school’s budget compared to just 10% of the budget of a typical public school. Unlike most public schools that rely largely on local tax money, there are virtually no private land owners on the reservations, so no taxpayers to tax. government enjoy sovereign status as separate nations, nearly all Indian education funding is tied up with federal strings. While the 565 Native American tribes recognized by the U.S.
She was the only student of 150 students who tested proficient on last year's state exams. Carleigh Campbell, 6th grader at Wounded Knee school. Nowhere is it more palpable than in the reservation’s schools, a jumble of public, private and federal systems that often overlap but rarely ever bolster the academic prospects of the most forgotten children in America. “But underneath all the baggage is intelligence, potential, and these children all have that.”įew communities in America are as eager for a silver lining as the Lakota of the Pine Ridge reservation, situated on more than 2 million rambling acres, nudged up against the Black Hills and Badlands National Park. “We’re in an urgent situation, an emergency state,” said Alice Phelps, principal at the Wounded Knee School. These realities wash onto the schoolyards here with little runoff or relief, trapping generations of young people in hopelessness and despair. Children often go hungry and adults die young. Families are destabilized by substance abuse and want. There is virtually no infrastructure, few jobs and no major economic engines. To state the obvious, Carleigh’s academic achievement is a bright spot in an epically dark place.Ĭarleigh is a Native American sixth grader at the Wounded Knee School located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where a well-documented plague of poverty and violence has festered since the Oglala Sioux were forced onto the reservation more than a century ago. It’s against this backdrop that Carleigh met expectations on the state's mandated exam, the only student out of about 150 in her school to do so. I always think I can cheer them up, so I try."' I think lots of people aren’t happy here. "I always think about how it could be happier.
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