The Council of Chief State School Officers is looking to a small-scale Montana program for help in reversing the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of American Indian children.
Despite federal attempts to raise the profile of the challenges that Native American students face, they are often an afterthought, said William Mendoza, the executive director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education.
“They’re underrepresented, underserved, and darn-near invisible,” Mendoza said.
While Congress and the Obama administration have pressed the Bureau of Indian Education to overhaul operations at the schools it oversees on or near American Indian reservations, more than 90 percent of the 950,000 American Indian children attend traditional public schools run by local districts.
That makes district- and state-level intervention crucial.
To that end, CCSSO leaders took a fact-finding trip to Montana this month to observe the state’s Schools of Promise program, an effort to raise standards and expectations—and provide the additional support needed to meet them—in the state’s poorest-performing schools.
Established in 2009 by state schools Superintendent Denise Juneau, the initiative uses federal school improvement grants to fuel a partnership among administrators, teachers’ union leaders, and school board members to focus on the academic and social-emotional needs of struggling students in struggling schools. The affected schools, most on or near a reservation in remote parts of the state, have overwhelmingly served American Indian children from families beset by deep, generational poverty.
The grant money pays for mental-health support services for students and instructional coaches for teachers, administrators, and school board members.
Juneau describes the academic results as a “mixed bag.” In some schools, graduation rates have risen and test scores have improved only to regress once the federal funding ran dry.
But it may be the latest best way of addressing problems that have lingered for decades because it offers “sheer hope,” Mendoza said.
Across the nation, Native American students are less likely to graduate from high school than any other racial or ethnic group, and the schools they attend are often not equipped to serve them.
Participants inby the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights and the White House Initiative on American Indian Education highlighted the hurdles to progress: disproportionate discipline, a complex process for filing federal civil rights complaints, and a lack of accurate portrayals of Native American culture and history in school lessons, among them.
“The listening tour revealed too many stories of school environments that, rather than building on the strengths of Native youth, are stifling their potential,” Mendoza said.
A report based on feedback gathered during the nine-stop, seven-state tour is part of an initiative the Obama administration launched in 2011 to support expanding opportunities and improving education outcomes for American Indian and Alaska Native students.
Another is the ongoing overhaul of the Bureau of Indian Education, the federal agency responsible for the education of roughly 50,000 American Indian children.
The central goal of the reorganization, known as the Blueprint for Reform, is to shift the agency’s role from provider to partner, paving the way for tribes to eventually run their own schools.
Opposed at the outset by some tribal leaders, the overhaul has hit snags and missed deadlines, but BIE Director Charles “Monty” Roessel remains optimistic.
“It’s given us an opportunity to engage with tribes more,” Roessel said. “Our system is broken, and we need to fix it.”
Trampling on Rights?
Not everyone agrees with the proposed fix, though.
A lawsuit filed by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota this month alleges that the U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Education are trampling on tribal rights.
The complaint alleges that the changes would reduce staff at reservation education offices that provide fede