How Washington created some of the worst schools in America
'It's just the epitome of broken,' Arne Duncan says. 'Just utterly bankrupt.'
It took 50 years for the federal government to admit officially that the education it had promised to provide Indian children was so bad it qualified as abuse. “Grossly inadequate,” wrote the authors of a scathing 1928 report. Forty years later, the feds were taking themselves to task again, in a report by Sen. Edward Kennedy, that called the state of Indian education a “national tragedy.”
Flash forward 46 more years. The network of schools for Native American children run by an obscure agency of the Interior Department remains arguably the worst school system in the United States, a disgrace the government has known about for eight decades and never successfully reformed. Earlier this fall, POLITICO asked President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, about perhaps the federal government’s longest-running problem: "It's just the epitome of broken,” he said. "Just utterly bankrupt."
The epitome of broken looks like Crystal Boarding School.
Tucked into the desert hills on a Navajo reservation 150 miles east of the Grand Canyon, Crystal has cracks running several feet down the walls, leaky pipes in the floors and asbestos in the basement. Students come from extremely troubled backgrounds but there is no full-time counselor. Last year, a new reading coach took one look at the rundown cinder block housing and left the next day. Science and social studies have been cut to put more attention on the abysmal reading and math scores, but even so, in 2013 only 5 percent of students were considered to have grade-level math skills.
"I don't even know what to say, " said Duncan. "It's just not right."
Crystal is one of 183 schools for Native American children scattered across reservations in 23 states and reporting to the federal Bureau of Indian Education, a small agency buried deep inside the sprawling and compartmentalized bureaucracy of the Department of Interior. The 48,000 students unfortunate enough to attend BIE schools have some of the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the country – even as the education they’re getting is among the nation’s most expensive; at $15,000 spent per pupil, the system costs 56 percent more than the national average.
“Frankly, we spend an enormous amount per student relative to other school systems for terrible results," Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said.
A year ago, President Obama decided to finally tackle the problem, a decision he pushed his team to make after an emotional visit to a Sioux reservation in the Dakotas. He told his Cabinet to "establish a pathway that leads to change" and that he would hold them accountable. His Interior Department has proposed a sweeping plan to allow more tribal control over the schools and rework the Bureau of Indian Education into a streamlined, modern school system - preferably before the end of Obama's term. But resistance, both within the agency and on the reservations, is high. Critics say the changes are being rushed and poorly communicated. They warn that paring back the federal government’s role will only make it easier to under-invest in schools that, by almost any measure, need money and resources the most.
When all the Washington fighting is over, it’s possible, those critics say, that some of the worst schools in America will get even worse.
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In the wake of the Civil War, as the federal government forcibly uprooted Native American tribes across the continent, some progressive educators saw an opportunity to remake Indian children in their own image.
One of these people was a former U.S. Army officer named Richard Henry Pratt, who founded in 1879 an Indian school in Pennsylvania, about 30 miles north of the Gettysburg battlefield, with authorization from the federal government. At Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School students were banned from speaking their Native languages and dressed to look like white students and even given new names. Dozens more boarding schools followed, all overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
When families balked at sending their children thousands of miles from home so that they could be taught to reject their own culture, Congress authorized the Secretary of the Interior, who was in charge of all matters relating to the tribes, to withhold food from any family that didn't turn over their children.
In time, this forced assimilation came to be seen for the abuse that it was. A 1928 report commissioned by the Interior Department found that teachers were under-qualified and malnourished students were, in the name of vocational training, put to work at jobs that may have violated child labor laws. So the government began closing down the boarding schools and replaced them with on-reservation schools like Crystal, which was built in 1935 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
But attempts to devolve more authority to the tribes lasted only until World War II when a House Select Committee on Indian Affairs proposed "a final solution of the Indian problem," a culture-busting program that involved sending children to
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/how-washington-created-the-worst-schools-in-america-215774#ixzz3sWUcWl5q
