Tony L. Dearman touts plans to bolster American Indian education

A Trump administration official Tuesday touted new plans to improve education for roughly 115,000 American Indian students on reservations.

Tony L. Dearman, director of the Bureau of Indian Education, told the National Indian Education Association on Capitol Hill that he has brought his experience in running a classroom and an off-reservation boarding school to the agency. As part of the Interior Department, the BIE runs nearly 200 schools in 23 states.

“We need to take control of our own destiny and our own campuses and our own kids,” said Mr. Dearman, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Public education for American Indians has long suffered low performance, aging facilities and chronic underfunding.

Officials estimate that nearly $4 billion in renovations are needed at schools on tribal lands, which are tax-exempt. Education leaders note that Congress appropriates about $20 million annually for school construction.

Schools struggle to recruit and retain teachers, especially American Indian teachers. Graduation rates are consistently lower than the national average, and the college matriculation rate is 19%.

“Uncle Sam needs to step up here,” Brent Gish, executive director of National Indian Impacted Schools Association, said to applause.

Mr. Dearman, who assumed the BIE helm at the end of 2016, has established a strategic vision emphasizing accountability and has worked to increased requirements to gather data.

“Congress has made it loud and clear to quit coming up here and telling us the stories,” he said. “We want to see the data.”

With new data pinpointing problems, the BIE has reduced its hiring time for new teachers from 96 to 18 days, Mr. Dearman said. The agency also has started a teacher recruitment program at all 350 tribal colleges.

A new federal rule will end a rigid, testing assessment system that has subjected the BIE to 23 different state assessment standards. The director also noted the agency’s move to assume control of making contracts with vendors.

“In BIE, we didn’t have control of facilities, we didn’t have control of IT, we didn’t have control of contracts,” Mr. Dearman said. “Imagine being a school system and ordering books, pencils, food, and you can’t do it. You have to go to another federal agency to do that. A lot of times we would start school and we wouldn’t even have food.”

The fiscal 2020 budget enacted in December includes additional funding for American Indian education programs, a boon and surprise for a budget item often at risk of being cut. The budget provides funds for Indian language programs, teachers, textbooks and Head Start programs at tribal colleges, which includes earmarks for trauma-informed education efforts.

“We know you need it,” said Michelle Sauve, intergovernmental affairs specialist with the Administration for Native Americans, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. “If your kids are being impacted by trauma at home, there will be some resources for that.”

A 2019 report from the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) found that improving education for tribal students requires more than fixing failing schools on reservations and includes improving history lessons in traditional public schools.

Currently, 27 states do not require mentioning of a single American Indian in their K-12 curriculums, the NCAI says. And nearly 90% of states don’t require any reference to American Indian education after the year 1900.

Another immediate need expressed at Tuesday’s meeting is the upcoming U.S. Census, which will determine funding levels for Indian education programs over the next decade. Some leaders worry that underreporting will lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” cycle.

“When we ceded millions of acres of land for settlement and entered into treaties to permanently have health care, education, infrastructure, and criminal justice support there was nothing in those treaties that talks about formulas and competitive grants,” said Kevin J. Allis, CEO of the National Congress of American Indians. “We need to make sure we get an accurate count.”

Mr. Dearman said there is no longer a revolving door of leadership at the BIE now that he has become the agency’s 35th director.

“Our job is to change the mindset of the BIE,” he said after receiving an honorary quilt from the NIEA. “We have so many issues across our tribal nations We need to be sharing some great stories in the future.”

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Corrected from earlier: An earlier version gave an incorrect surname for Mr. Dearman. It also incorrectly described him as being the 40th director of the BIE. He is the 35th such director.