PART TWO
“White people call it nepotism. We call it kinship.”
CHAPTER THREE
Unprepared
A Narrative of Victimhood
YOU CAN DRIVE for miles on the Pine Ridge reservation without seeing another human being. GPS doesn’t recognize many of the addresses here in rural South Dakota. Of course, it’s possible to drive long distances in the American West without coming upon a major town, but gas stations and convenience stores and fast-food restaurants usually pop up fairly often on the major roads. On Pine Ridge, though, if you don’t fill up your gas tank at the right time, you might find yourself out of luck.
To say that this area is rural doesn’t really begin to describe it. “Desolate” comes closer. On the first morning of my visit to Pine Ridge, I left my motel and drove toward a school I planned to visit. I traveled almost 40 miles before I saw a place to buy a cup of coffee. I’m told that there used to be a coffee stand at a shack in the motel parking lot, but the owners didn’t get enough customers. A couple of locals told me that they couldn’t get permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to put up a sign on the road.
About 3,000 people live in the Wounded Knee School District in Manderson, South Dakota. Manderson is in the middle of the Pine Ridge reservation, which makes up most of Oglala Lakota County (formerly Shannon County), the second poorest county in the United States. In 2013, the five police officers assigned to patrol the area received a staggering 16,500 calls for emergency assistance. Sitting at breakfast with me in Rapid City, 100 miles away, Stacy Phelps pauses to let me do the math. Phelps, CEO of the American Indian Institute for Innovation – which has been brought in to “turn around” the Wounded Knee school, among others – wants me to understand the statistics that he’s up against.
More than one of the men I interview ask me whether my husband wasn’t concerned about me traveling through the reservation alone, particularly at night. A sign in my motel room requests that I use the rag provided rather than bath towels to clean my gun. Statistics are hard to come by, but as of 2009, there were 39 gangs on the reservation, involving more than 5,000 young men. The average life expectancy for men on the reservation is 48, and for women it’s 52. Suicide and poor health are partly to blame for those numbers, but so is violence.1
With unemployment at more than 80 percent2 and alcoholism rampant, Pine Ridge is a hard place to grow up. The schools’ first job, it has to be said, is to keep children safe. Since Phelps’s team took over two years ago, there’s general agreement that the school is a calmer place. When I walk through the halls of Wounded Knee – which goes from kindergarten through eighth grade – they’re quiet. Although the area outside of the school is run-down, with trailer homes falling apart and trash strewn about, the inside of the school is clean, freshly painted, and bright. It also seems fairly empty – the school operates at less than half of capacity.
Alice Phelps, the newly installed principal and Stacy’s sister-in-law, takes me to visit some of the classrooms, where teachers seem to be doing everything in their power to keep things under control. In a second-grade class, the teacher speaks to students in a soothing voice, telling them to “let go of the negative.” She asks them to “think about what we can do today to be successful – to make it into third grade.” Most of the dozen students seem to be listening while she offers instructions on how to write a friendly (as opposed to formal) letter. After going through the different choices for salutations, she tells them “We don’t write mean things in a friendly letter.”
While Phelps and I watch the youngest children play in a kindergarten classroom, we talk about their home life. “One weekend a month, we have lock-in,” she explains.
“Lock-in?” I ask, wondering what these innocent-looking kids have done to deserve this punishment.
Lock-in is not punishment, she assures me. It’s when children stay at school all weekend for safety. Although the weekend is billed as a cultural enrichment event for the children – they sing songs and play traditional games in the school’s gym – Phelps tells me that it’s timed to coincide with when government checks go out. These are the times when parents are most likely to drink and become abusive, she offers matter-of-factly. Indeed, Wounded Knee’s families have earned such a bad reputation that other schools are afraid to send their kids here for basketball games and other community events, Phelps says, because “our parents are so violent and our kids are so disrespectful.”
The rhythm of life at Wounded Knee is actually surprisingly dependent on the timing of government subsidies. In the days leading up to food stamp distributions, Phelps finds that kids are particularly hungry and distracted, because there’s not enough food at home. The school generally gives kids breakfast, lunch, and snacks, but when they come in on Mondays after a weekend at home, more than one teacher reports that the boys and girls are famished. Right after the food stamps come, many children are absent from school because they’re traveling with their families to the other side of the reservation to do grocery shopping.
There are occasional violent incidents at the school. But Wounded Knee has had to learn to deal with them independently. Phelps will occasionally call the police, but she explains that there’s usually something more urgent that the police officers have to attend to elsewhere. Nor does the school get much support from tribal child services. Children who are a danger to themselves or others might be removed briefly, but there aren’t many alternative places to keep them. And so the school has to create its own support system as much as possible.
Wounded Knee received a $630,000 school turnaround grant from the federal government in 2014. With the funds, Phelps purchased 40 new computers and was able to finally get curricula and textbooks for reading and math. Before that, the teachers just photocopied from whatever textbook they came across in the school office. Wounded Knee has also instituted a system of “good behavior” incentives, whereby students who participate in class, complete homework assignments, and have no behavior problems can earn time playing on an Xbox or go online in the school’s resource room.
Wounded Knee uses a system of incentives for the parents too – which is not uncommon at schools on reservations. At parent-teacher conferences, the school offers door prizes. They conduct drives and give away food – including turkeys on Thanksgiving. The school provides bus service to help parents come to the conferences.
Phelps shows me one innovation of which she’s especially proud. Wounded Knee is in the process of installing laundry facilities in one of its buildings for parents to use. The closest Laundromat is more than 50 miles away, and most of the families can’t afford washing machines in their own homes. She estimates that the free laundry could save families more than a thousand dollars a year and could be used to lure mothers and fathers for parenting classes and other community activities.
Phelps says her efforts seem to be working – 70 percent of the parents showed up for open house at the beginning of the year, compared with about 30 percent the previous year. The parents themselves are also trying to become more involved in the school and the community. Over the summer, the school asked for help and donations to improve the housing for teachers in Manderson. The donation drives brought in vanities, doors, door handles, cupboard handles, drywall, and paint.
The truth of the matter is that even with improved safety, many parents who live in the district still don’t want to send their kids to Wounded Knee. They’d rather have their kids travel hours each day to get something moderately better at a Catholic school or at a public school off the reservation. In a survey, parents reported that the two biggest problems with the school were “bullying” and “low expectations.”
Phelps is trying to raise those expectations. “We really want to push them to where they need to be,” she tells me. “It has just been a cycle – years of poor teaching – teachers who weren’t really driven by data. Everything we do is driven by data.”
Phelps is right. The data are deeply dep
ressing. Here’s a summary of the situation from a 2013 article in Education Week:
In South Dakota, which has the highest proportion of Native American students of any state, they lag on every academic indicator. According to the state’s 2012–13 report card, 42 percent of American Indian students scored “proficient” or “advanced” on state math exams, while 80 percent of white students did so. In reading, 47 percent of American Indian students scored proficient or higher, compared to 79 percent of white students. The four-year graduation rate for South Dakota’s American Indian students in 2013 – 49 percent – paints an even grimmer picture. And while the high-school-completion rate, which includes getting a diploma in more than four years or a GED, was much better, at 64 percent, American Indians still trailed every other major subgroup in the state by 17 or more percentage points. In 2009–10, the four-year graduation rate at Pine Ridge High School, the biggest high school on the reservation, was 45 percent.3
Phelps’s turnaround team aims to bring students up by at least two grade levels this year. “We have seventh-graders who are performing at a third-grade level,” Phelps laments.
Despite the improvements that Alice and Stacy Phelps have managed to implement with regard to school safety, my visit to the school left me skeptical of their ability to improve the school’s academic record significantly.
At a third-grade class I visited with Alice, students mostly sat at their desks doing math problems, but several had lined up for help from the teacher. Phelps took one boy aside and offered to help him herself.
The first word problem he was struggling with asked, “If a number rounded to the nearest hundred is 400, what is the highest number it could be?” When the student guessed 500, Phelps told him he was correct. The next problem asked, “If a store sold 128 items the first week and 37 more than that the second week, how many did they sell all together?” Phelps instructed the boy to add 128 and 37 to get the answer.
Such misguided help – giving a child the wrong answers to what are probably first-grade math problems – seems nothing short of educational malpractice. It certainly does not inspire confidence.
In other regards, Phelps seems like a very competent woman. When she walks the halls of Wounded Knee, she comes off like someone who means business. Because she reports to the American Indian Institute for Innovation rather than the school board, she has escaped some of the political machinations that plague other schools on the reservation. As she notes, “A lot of times, the schools are the only employment places in the communities. So a lot of times, the family members [of the school board or the tribal leaders] are employed and it’s hard to get in there and put in an improvement plan or reprimand someone, let alone put someone out of a job.”
I hear this numerous times from other educators. Parents who have relatives on the tribal council or the school board will call teachers or principals to ensure that their kids never receive a failing grade or get held back, even when it’s clearly necessary for their child’s sake.
Improving the economic situation on reservations isn’t just about improving access to capital for residents. It’s also, as Winfield Russell, of the Northern Cheyenne tribal council, notes, a human resources problem. Most of the talented young people leave, and those who stay tend to take jobs in the tribal government, putting their talents toward applying for grants from the federal government.
When I ask Crow legislator Conrad Stewart whether he thinks young people on the reservation have the education and the job skills necessary to succeed in today’s economy, he becomes very animated. When he was growing up, he says, you didn’t see many Crow people working off the reservation – because of discrimination, he suggests. But now, he says, “a lot of times, they don’t look at the color of your skin.” The result? “Now you’ve got Crows working at the swimming pool. . . . You’ve got Crows working at McDonald’s. . . . You’ve got Crows working at the truck stop there, a whole mess of Crows working there in Pizza Hut. And you’ve got Crows working at Papa John’s.” Finally he mentions: “We’ve got attorneys.”
But what seems clear from this exchange is the fact that tribal leaders are happy even if the only jobs tribe members can get are at the bottom of the economic ladder. And despite my prompting, Stewart sees no problems with the kinds of educational preparation that kids on the reservation are receiving.
Other leaders, like Karl Little Owl, acknowledge that there’s a problem with public education on the reservation, but they attribute it to a lack of funding. And Little Owl worries that students are being “bombarded” with too much “standardized testing.” There’s little evidence, however, that either of these problems explains what’s wrong with the schools. In fact, it’s striking how officials on Indian reservations offer the same excuses as officials in inner cities to explain the poor performance of local public schools.
As of 2010, only 14.4 percent of students were at or above proficiency levels at Lodge Grass High School, located on the Crow reservation. At Lame Deer, meanwhile, that number was 17.8 percent. And the graduation rates were abysmal too, with only 52 percent from Lodge Grass and 39 percent from Lame Deer graduating on time.4 According to the Montana Office of Public Instruction, per-pupil spending at Lame Deer was $23,386 for the 2013–14 school year, compared with a statewide average of $10,625.5 At Lodge Grass it was over $27,304. Reservation schools are among the worst in the nation. They’d give any inner-city school a run for its money when it comes to academic inadequacy and even students’ safety.
For many Indian students, their first step out of high school is attending a tribal college. There are now 32 of these schools, which were launched in the 1970s to offer a kind of transition between a reservation high school and a traditional four-year college.
Sadly, tribal college has been an end, not a means. Even Richard Littlebear, the president of Chief Dull Knife College in southeastern Montana, tells me that students are simply getting multiple associate’s degrees, not transferring to other schools. There’s not much difference, says Littlebear, between Chief Dull Knife and a typical community college. Perhaps that’s true, but few of the students seem to be gaining marketable skills – even if there were an actual job market to enter. In addition to courses in IT and mathematics, students can take courses in Native American Studies, Cheyenne Studies, and Arts and Crafts. But the school receives accreditation just like any other community college. And if the students do transfer out – say, to a state university in Montana – they receive two years’ worth of credits regardless of what courses they took. But whether they’re prepared for the work at a traditional public or private school is another story.
As a 2014 article in the Atlantic pointed out, “Despite getting more than $100 million a year in federal funding – including grants low-income students use to pay tuition – tribal colleges often have abysmal success rates.”6 According to a Hechinger Report, the percentage of students who earn a two-year degree within three years or a four-year degree in six years is only 20 percent.7
Tribal colleges often compare themselves to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which they say get more money per pupil than tribal colleges. For example, whereas tribal colleges receive a maximum of $8,000 per student, Howard University students get an average of $20,000 per year. But an important question is how much money these colleges are spending per degree awarded. “The Tribal Institute of American Indian Arts in new Mexico,” according to the Atlantic, “spends $504,000 for every degree it confers . . . more than Harvard or MIT.”
In fact, the comparison with black colleges is instructive for other reasons. Although the historical impetus for black colleges is clear, the need for them today is less obvious. Black students attending predominantly white institutions have higher graduation rates than those at HBCUs. Since there’s no admissions discrimination at other schools – indeed, many colleges would be happy to claim a higher percentage of minority students – perhaps the need for these tribal colleges, just like the need
for black colleges, is becoming less urgent. And for those who are truly concerned about young Indian students’ economic future, encouraging them to attend higher education institutions off the reservation is probably a better option.
How did things go awry at these tribal colleges? The story of their failures parallels that of many other colleges and universities tasked with helping underprivileged students. First of all, they instituted an open-enrollment policy, which may seem like a good idea, but to anyone who watched the decline of schools like City College in New York as a result of open enrollment, it’s clear that a college must have some basic criteria for determining who’s qualified to enter. Most students spend at least a year of their time at tribal colleges taking remedial courses.
Of course, because of the dreadful employment situation on the reservations, many students don’t have much incentive to get through school. Even if they gain skills in a field like nursing or elementary education, job opportunities are extraordinarily limited. And, truth be told, those jobs are filled just as often by relatives of people in tribal leadership as they are by people who might be more qualified. There’s nothing resembling a meritocracy on many of the reservations, and the schools are both a cause and an effect of this problem.
It’s also true that these tribal colleges had another mission besides educating kids for careers, which was to help pass on the tribe’s culture and language. An admirable goal, no doubt, but one wonders whether that didn’t become the primary function of these schools.
The New Trail of Tears Page 10
