How Title VII Indian Education Formula Grant Projects should be Deployed and their Work Evaluated

Since 1972, the stated mission of Indian Education programs across the nation is to meet the “culturally related academic needs” of American Indian students. There has never been a clear or common definition of exactly what those needs are. Most projects provide academic tutoring, advocacy, counseling, cultural enrichment, curriculum supplementation, and other like services. The programs have also served to bring aboard American Indian staff in many districts. The majority of these positions are paraprofessional but there has evolved a solid core of professional educators. In addition, the programs provide a vehicle for community involvement through their mandated parent committees.

Over the years, most programs have developed into an integral part of local districts they serve and have become a highly valued resource. Yet, despite three decades of dedicated effort by more than a thousand programs, the dropout rate remains high and graduation rate low for Indian students across the nation. Fiscal conservatives in congress have begun to question the value of continued funding. Like all other DOE programs, the Office of Indian Education has been required by the General Provision Reporting Act (GPRA) to declare a specific measurable objectives which congress will use in helping determine which programs receive continued funding when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is up for reauthorization in a few years.

Under the leadership of the new director, the USDE Office of Indian Education has hinged future funding of the agency with a projected demonstration of “adequate yearly progress” toward the goal of absolute parity of achievement test scores of Indian students compared to national norms. Programs are being required to justify individual expenditures by rationalizing some sort of direct measurable impact upon test scores within the school year. The practical outcome of this policy is to discourage cultural enrichment and community participation in favor of more remediation.

Thus, with these new requirements Title VII projects have been brought full circle to where they began. The nations network of 1200 Title VII Indian Education projects have been launched upon a new experiment to demonstrate again the only lesson they have proven the last thirty years which is that remediation doesn’t work. Either as a strategy for reducing dropouts or for demonstrating the value of Title VII projects, focusing on test scores is a bad idea.

Instead, we should be looking to the nations network of 1200 Title VII Indian Education projects to lead the way in demonstrating how best to motivate Indian students. If Title VII Projects wish to demonstrate their worth to congress, they should do so through public demonstrations of student work. They can do this by fostering local credit worthy, culturally related, authentic projects that are chosen by Title VII students and guided by Title VII Staff and parents.

Title VII projects have the perfect vehicle to undertake student driven projects. Each program has a formal parent committee which can provide a mechanism allow student influence upon project expenditures via the project parent committees that are required by law to have high school representation. Indeed, there have been a number of programs that have ventured already in this direction with some promising results.

If Title VII Programs must choose a measurable objective, their efforts should be aimed at increasing attendance and reducing dropouts rather than reading and math scores. This is because it is difficult (if not impossible) to determine the impact upon gain in test scores that can be attributed specifically to Title VII services versus the rest of the 6-hour day. The strongest Title VII project cannot overcome the effect of a bad system and, by the same token, cannot take credit for the success of a good one. Since so much other federal money is being focused on the elementary level, Indian education projects should seek to distinguish themselves by focusing on the much-neglected upper grades where their work may be more visible. More importantly, this is the part of the system where the real problem lies. In the end, the only statistic that should count for projects should be dropouts and graduates.

Robey J. Clark

robeyclark@buffalostonewoman.com