But over the course of our conversation, she gets much more specific. For instance, she tells me that “many people here do not have the foundation to adapt to the majority Caucasian economy and don’t know how to live in that environment – they are absolutely lost.”
She believes that the education system in Robeson County is failing to impart the necessary skills for the 21st-century economy. But they’re falling down on the job in other ways too. “We are failing to educate students to be good citizens, to manage their own affairs, to be confident learners – whether they choose agriculture as a profession or teaching, whether they remain here or move out of state.”
Lowry, who has also taught math at the secondary level, says that the schools have deteriorated significantly since she was enrolled. This is a theme I hear repeatedly during my time in Lumberton. Even people like Lowry’s sister, who went to schools that were still segregated, believe their own education was superior to what their children and grandchildren have received. Sometimes you hear from parents who think there’s too much testing in the schools or who believe that the Common Core curriculum has made math incomprehensible to students. But mostly, parents and students complain about a complete breakdown in discipline, a lack of qualified teachers, and poor leadership both among principals and on the school boards.
Also, Lowry says, there is “way too much input from the parents,” and not the kind you’d want. “We don’t track the kids, because we’re trying to satisfy the parents.” Parents often complain that the work is too hard, and administrators, according to Lowry, tell the teachers not to assign such difficult material. The teachers are unmotivated, and the schools are so desperate for substitutes that the ones they hire sometimes step out into the hall during class to talk on the phone. Or they eat a meal at their desk while students just watch.
The results of this poor schooling are clear to Lowry in her classroom at Bladen Community College. She says that only about 25 percent of the kids who came to her introductory accounting course were actually prepared to do the work. Most of her students seem to have just been passed through grade after grade without actually learning the material.
Cheryl Beasley, the nursing professor at UNC Pembroke, has had the same experience with nursing students. She has actually been criticized for not admitting a sufficient quantity of Indians to the program at Pembroke, but she says that many local students are simply not meeting the standards. They don’t know how to study or how to manage their time, and they don’t know how to ask for help from their professors either – particularly if their professors aren’t Indian. She says the Indian kids “are more likely to give up.” And although some people attribute that to low self-esteem, she thinks Indian students are simply unprepared. “The jump from high school to college for them is massive,” she tells me.
When Beasley attended the local schools, they were segregated – there was one school for whites, one for blacks, and one for Indians. Although there were obviously many drawbacks to the arrangement, Beasley notes that she never experienced racism at school. No one is advocating a return to segregation, but other researchers have confirmed Beasley’s impression that school integration in the South often resulted in poorer outcomes for racial minorities.
In his book Acting White, Stuart Buck paints a stark picture of what black students in one of the newly integrated schools would’ve faced: a lack of black adult role models, white teachers who were at best condescending and at worst hostile to them, and white peers who tried to keep them out of extracurricular activities. Black students, who were typically behind their white peers academically, were placed in the lowest-performing classes.10 All evidence suggests that Indians experienced many of the same problems.
The schools in Robeson County today are doing a poor job of educating students in general, but Indians seem to be at the bottom. At Purnell Swett, the high school that most of the Native American students I interview say they are attending or slated to attend, less than a third of students pass English II, and less than an eighth pass Algebra. Among Indians, the percentage of those who pass both is 21 percent, which is lower than for whites and Hispanics but higher than for blacks.11
It’s hardly any wonder, then, that Beasley finds the pool of students applying to her program to be underqualified and also sees major challenges for those who are admitted to UNC Pembroke. In order to complete the nursing program and move on to a clinical setting, students have to take a math exam each semester and score at 100 percent. (These are people who are going to be administering medicine, after all, and there’s no room for error.) Unfortunately, says Beasley, about 40 percent of the kids who are admitted don’t succeed. “They wash out because they can’t do the math.”
Ben Chavis says the problems at the local schools aren’t hard to diagnose. One of the biggest ones is that teachers and principals are hired based on their political connections, not their qualifications. “White people call it nepotism. We call it kinship,” he is fond of saying. Indeed, Chavis says that few people in the community are willing to be critical of the schools, even if they know their kids aren’t learning much, because the teachers are usually related to them. This is not an uncommon problem in small towns generally, but it seems exacerbated in Indian communities.
At Pine Ridge, too, it’s clear that, whatever the quality of education on the reservation, it’s the politicians who run things. Not only do they determine what goes on inside the boundaries of the reservation, they’re the people who have the most contact with non-Native politicians and the levers of power in Washington.
If Cecilia Fire Thunder, a former president of the Lakota tribe, says that the only thing Lakotas need in order to be more successful is more money, politicians in Washington listen. And it’s not only politicians from South Dakota who want to ensure that they have the votes of Native Americans when the next election comes around. This is something that goes all the way to the White House. In 2015, President Obama announced that his budget would include $1 billion for Indians, including a $150 million increase to the Bureau of Indian Education budget. There was another $130 million for school construction, an increase of nearly $60 million over the year before. The plan also included funding for more broadband Internet access in schools.12
The truth, though, is that funneling more money into these schools’ budgets isn’t going to fix their problems. And the money that’s already allocated to them is mismanaged to an incredible degree. Just ask Keith Moore. The former director of the Bureau of Indian Education, Moore told me that the BIE was “an inefficient, ineffective, poorly structured bureaucracy.” Which was the gist of a memo he tells me he sent to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in 2012. (I made several attempts to obtain the memo through a Freedom of Information Act request, but the BIA has been unresponsive.)
The first problem he sees, and Moore isn’t the only one to point this out, is that the Bureau of Indian Education is part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not the Department of Education. So whereas most BIA officials are devoted to things like natural resource questions and land development, they also technically oversee education – a subject, notes Moore, they know nothing about. Moreover, the BIA’s finances were hard to untangle. “I found it interesting that it was hard to track how the dollars were spent when they were allocated by Congress. I couldn’t say with a clear meaning that every dollar appropriated for Indian education was actually being spent on Indian education. The BIA could make that money work differently than [intended]. The BIA had a number of other interests.”
And for that matter, it appears that plenty of the money was misspent once it reached the reservation. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the BIE was aware that 24 schools had misspent $13.8 million in federal Indian School Equalization Program funding on unallowable expenses. But as Rishawn Biddle points out on the blog Dropout Nation, “the agency has done nothing to follow-up on the evidence, either by conducting second audits to determine the weakness
es of the schools’ financial controls, or to sanction the schools and tribes that operate them for the malfeasance.”13
But it’s not just the money that worries Moore. The Bureau of Indian Education is actually responsible for only a fraction of Indian kids. The majority are educated in state-run public schools. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, there’s reliable data on those students. For kids in BIE-run schools, that’s not the case, says Moore. “There has to be a quality data and research system developed. We didn’t have that.”
Tribal leaders and Native school board members say they want to have more power over the schools on the reservation. “They say it’s their sovereign right,” Moore says, but there needs to be a “tough conversation” about which schools are more successful in educating Indian kids. “But these are conversations people aren’t willing to have yet.”
Moore was born on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and lived there until he was eight. His mother was “full-blood Native” and his father was an Irishman. They met at a dance in a border community. His mother was a school nurse, and his father drove the bookmobile. Though his parents weren’t highly educated, he tells me, he and his brothers got a decent education. “The public schools had solid teachers and administrators.” Although he’s “not saying that the people working in schools today are bad,” he assures me, “we have to face the facts and talk about the facts as professionally as we can. We don’t have the quality teachers and school leaders we had a generation ago. In science and math and language arts, especially at the middle- and high-school levels, it is tough to find a quality teacher.”
When he was director of the BIE, Moore notes, Native Americans would often come to Washington and say “We need more language and culture in the schools.” He says that preserving Indian language and culture is “one piece of a 100-piece puzzle. I want language and culture too, but that won’t cure our educational dilemma. There are too many other pieces to say ‘This is it.’”
A major part of the puzzle, Moore acknowledges, is fixing the family problems plaguing the reservations. “You have broken homes, teen moms, dads not involved, people unemployed.” He believes that the “socioeconomic problems are creating school problems.” And while some parents know enough to bus their kids 30 miles to a school off the reservation, many simply are unaware of the difference.
But he also sees large segments of the population as “open to educational reform.” He thinks that “a number of Native folks would like to see charter legislation.” Moore isn’t sure that’s necessary to achieve the desired ends, since technically BIE schools are free from the control of the local school board. They could actually operate independently, redirect the curriculum – include more language and culture, perhaps. But someone would still have to put some academic measures of success in place, and right now it’s hard to imagine anyone on the reservation being able or willing to do this.
CHAPTER FOUR
Walking in Two Worlds
The Weight of Indian Identity
WHEN ANAIYA HOLMAN’S grandmother dropped her off here at Ben Chavis’s farm in Lumberton two weeks ago, she was not happy. School had just let out the day before, and Anaiya, who had just finished the fifth grade, didn’t want to be stuck in a classroom learning math until July. In fact, she screamed and cried and kicked Chavis in his unmentionables. Chavis was, according to the reports of his other students, unfazed.
This is the fourth year that Chavis has invited kids from Robeson County to come learn math for three weeks at his 200-acre cattle farm in a barn that he has converted into five air-conditioned classrooms. Most of the kids are Lumbees, though a few identify as black or Hispanic (the county is 40 percent Indian).
Some of the boys and girls are happy to be here, but the majority of the 50 or so students between fifth and ninth grade who show up on any given day would rather be doing something else. “That’s okay,” says Chavis. “This is not supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to help them learn.”
And, boy, do these kids need help. Students in Robeson County scored an average of 1247 (out of 2400) on the SATs in 2012, more than 200 points below the state average,1 which was already 40 points below the national average. Students and parents both told me that even if students received Ds and Fs on their report cards, they were sent to the next grade. One parent of a rising fifth-grader told me that the school was giving his son an “okay education.” When I later observed the boy in a classroom, he was stumped by flash cards with questions like “11 – 5 = ?”
Several of the students at math camp are living in group homes either temporarily or permanently. Their parents are in some cases incarcerated or too strung out on drugs to care for them adequately. Many other students come from single-parent households.
Chavis does a service to the community merely by providing a disciplined, safe environment for these children, but math camp is much more than that. Between the hours of 8:30 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. every day, the kids get 120 hours’ worth of math instruction (interspersed with a few hours of reading, physical education, and lunch). That’s equivalent to what they’d get in a year at a typical public school.
When students arrive in the morning, they spend the first hour and a half on math. They don’t switch classrooms. The classes are all equipped with restrooms and water fountains, so the kids never need to leave. Teachers drill the concepts over and over. They use flash cards, ask children to do problems on dry-erase boards, and have children compete with each other to get answers right. The closest thing these classrooms have to technology is an electric pencil sharpener.
For physical education, the kids at math camp do some calisthenics and run the road around Chavis’s farm, just as Chavis himself did half a century ago. It’s hot, and they’re tired. But they push through. Their teachers are rooting for them, and so are their grandparents.
Students are given about two hours of homework each night. Some of them stay after school to do their homework in a small house where the teachers live. Detention (which can involve anything from washing windows and emptying the garbage to shoveling manure in the barn next door) is given for infractions like tardiness, talking back to teachers, and failing to turn in homework.
The method, as old-fashioned as it sounds, works. In 2001, Chavis took over the failing American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, California, where his strict standards and no-nonsense attitude earned him the ire of many school administrators but also the respect of many of the low-income neighborhood parents. During Chavis’s tenure as principal, AIPCS became one of the highest-performing schools in the state of California, and in 2013 and 2014 it was ranked the number one high school in America, with 100 percent of its students passing at least one AP test.2 More than three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, but all of its graduates are accepted to college, and Chavis helps them pay for tuition.
As Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute wrote on one of the occasions when Oakland tried to shut down the school, “Low-income black and Hispanic [American Indian Model charter] students actually outperform the statewide averages for wealthier whites and Asians. AIM even outperforms Lowell, one of San Francisco’s most respected and academically selective high schools.”3
Chavis stepped down as principal a couple of years ago, after he was accused of profiting from the school. He doesn’t deny the accusation. He leased property to the school – though it was at below-market rates. And he did construction for the school – though his firm was the lowest bidder on the jobs and had done construction for other schools as well. To be honest, though, one would be tempted to give a long leash to anyone who could get such stellar academic results for students stuck in America’s worst-performing districts.
Back at the barn, though, everything is charity. Although a few families pay the $300 tuition, the vast majority pay nothing. Some of the mothers offer to cook dinner for the teachers a few evenings in lieu of payment. One of the students actually lives with Chavis and his three childr
en during the week. She’s very quiet and doesn’t want to be here. When her mother arrives to cook dinner, she’s in tears, begging to go home. But her mother can’t drive her back and forth every day and wants her to be here. Chavis tells me the mother formerly used drugs and worked as a prostitute but has cleaned up her act. He encourages her to leave her daughter without letting the girl make a scene. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but the mother tells me quietly, “It is for the best.”
The atmosphere at math camp, one soon-to-be ninth-grader tells me, is “peaceful.” Unlike at the school he attends the rest of the year, there’s no fighting and no drugs. Fighting and drugs are probably the two biggest reasons that most of these kids’ teachers are generally focused on the “troublemakers,” as student Lenora Moore puts it.
Because the atmosphere at math camp is so strict and the classes are so small, the teachers Chavis employs generally don’t have to deal with such problems. Two of them are graduates of AIPCS. One, a Mexican immigrant, is studying to be a civil engineer at Sacramento State, and the other, who grew up in a home where bullets from rival gangs whizzed through her yard, is studying marine biology at the University of Hawaii.
Chavis also has an old friend who’s a retired actuary teaching fifth-grade math. Paul Hanson, a Seattle native, met Chavis on a trip to Mexico about 15 years ago. When I asked what possessed him to come to North Carolina in the middle of June to teach kids who may not want to be here, Hanson says he likes the “integrity and straightforwardness” of the program. “The kids are going to improve, dammit. The kids are going to like math.”
Whereas Chavis says he doesn’t care whether the kids like it, Hanson is confident they will. “Kids have a natural affinity to mathematics,” he tells me. “They like the order. They like the simplicity. And they like the creativity.”
The New Trail of Tears Page 12
