Dropout Nation: Bureau of Indian Education in need of reforms

Wednesday, June 20, 2012  

"If the Knowledge Is Power Program announced that it was developing a new school accountability and data system for all of its schools throughout the country, school reformers and education reporters would spend hours and thousands of words analyzing its consequences. If a state education agency also directly ran a third of the schools within its state, effectively acting as one of the nation’s largest districts, Rick Hess would spend hours discussing whether it is taking the right approaches to managing operations and even asking if it should be in the school operating business at all. If nearly all of a major urban district’s schools were some of the worst-performing in the nation — and had been nests of educational and physical abuse for more than a century — it would be rightly criticized by outfits such as the Education Trust for decades of inaction. And if there were numerous opportunities for turnaround efforts, spurred in part by its application to the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act, charter school operators and Parent Power activists would be sniffing around.

Yet school reformers spend little time pondering the future — or the possibilities for systemic reform — of such an outfit now: The U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, whose enrollment of more than 48,000 American Indian children makes it one of the nation’s largest — and worst-performing — school districts, one of the smallest – and least-effective — state education agencies, and one of the largest contractor and authorizer of schools. Overhauling BIE would both help advance the transformation of American public education and deal with one of the shames of this nation’s history."

Get the Story:
The Opportunity for Reform: Why the Bureau of Indian Education Deserves Attention (Dropout Nation 6/19)