Improving Indian Education in the 21^st Century?

By Clara NiiSka

According to documents recently provided to Press/ON  by the state Department of Children, Families & Learning, including CF&L’s report, “Class of 1999, ending status of students by ethnicity,” 463 Indian students graduated from high school in the state of Minnesota in 1999.  CF&L has not yet released statistics detailing Indian students’ more recent graduation rates.

Two years ago, this newspaper published a series of articles addressing the problems of Indian education, including a summary of the then-recent study of graduation rates for the Class of 1997.  Out of a total public school enrollment of 16,956 Indian students, 447 seniors graduated from high school.  The graduation rates calculated by the state for 1997 ranged from a low of 13% in the Minneapolis public schools, to 73% in Cloquet and 94%—fifteen of sixteen high school seniors—in Waubun.  An additional 24 students graduated from tribally-run Indian schools in 1997.  Since then, enrollment in tribally-run secondary schools has declined, and informed sources estimate that about a dozen seniors graduated from the four tribally-run schools in Minnesota, most of them from the Bug-o-nay-ge-shig school on Leech Lake reservation.

Official state statistics for this year are not yet available.  But, despite Indian students’ improved passing rates on the state’s basic standards test on writing, the “pass” rates on state reading and math tests in majority-Indian schools like Red Lake were the lowest of all state public schools.  Difficulties with the state’s mandatory basic skills tests have, most likely, not only lowered Indian graduation rates even more, but have also increased the likelihood of students’ dropping out of school rather than facing further failure.

Press/ON recently examined the state’s statistics on Indian enrollment and dropout rates, and on page 5 of this issue there is a summary chart detailing year-by-year enrollment and dropout figures for the four school districts with the most Indian students: Minneapolis, Red Lake, Cass Lake, and Bemidji.  We have arranged the data so that it details the progress of each group of students as they go through school.

For example, the “Class of 2001” refers to students who started the first grade in 1989 and who should have graduated from high school this year.  According to the state’s enrollment figures for the Minneapolis school district, there were 327 first-graders beginning the Class of 2001 twelve years ago.  This year, there were 88 Indian high school seniors in the Minneapolis public schools; at press time we had not yet received documents from CF&L providing statistics detailing the few Indian students in the Class of 2001 who succeeded in graduating.

Our chart is something like a pile of school yearbooks.  Community members in school after 1989, particularly in the rural school districts, remember the names of most of the other Indian students who went through school with them—and know the twenty-three ninth graders who dropped out of Red Lake high school in 1997-98, for example: as friends … relatives … other kids who were trying to get through school and who, for whatever reason, quit.

Press/ON has also included year-by-year student dropout figures in the summary chart.  The state’s computerized records enumerate those seventh- through twelfth-graders who have been reported as dropping out of school since 1990.  In its “Class of 1999” report, data analysts at CF&L limited their study of dropout rates to students who abandoned the same school district as that in which they began the ninth grade.  Tracking individuals through a single school district provides precise data about some students.  But, that kind of study ignores students whose problems in school are aggravated by their families’ geographic mobility—especially in an educational system where the curriculum is designed by the local school board.  It also does not include students who dropped out in the seventh or eighth grades.

In comparison, Press/ON  focused on each group of students as they went through school.  We added up the state’s numbers for year-by-year dropouts for each Class.  Our “cumulative percent” compares the total number of Indian students dropping out of school after seventh grade, with the number of students who began secondary education in their Class in the seventh grade.  For example, in 1995-6 in the Cass Lake public schools, there were 52 Indian seventh-graders in the Class of 2001.  One girl dropped out of school.  Some seventh-graders transferred into the Cass Lake public school system from tribally-run schools, parochial schools, and other public school districts; and some students left Cass Lake for other schools.  The next year, there were 47 eighth-graders in the Class of 2001 in Cass Lake.  Five more students dropped out of school at Cass Lake during the eighth grade, but they were replaced by students whose families moved back to the rez, and students transferring into the public school system after graduating from the 8^th grade at St. Phillips Catholic school in Bemidji and other non-public schools.  In 1997-8, the Class of 2001 had swelled to 58 ninth-grade Indian students in the Cass Lake public schools.

According to the state of Minnesota’s statistics, fourteen Indian kids dropped out of the Class of 2001 as ninth-graders in Cass Lake, but they were ‘replaced’ by other students transferring into public school there—and, perhaps, by kids who had been going to school in Cass Lake for years, but were not classified as “Indians.”  In 1998-9, there were 57 tenth-grade Indians of the Class of 2001 at Cass Lake; sixteen of those tenth-graders dropped out of school.  By the time they began their senior year last fall, there were 32 Indian students remaining in the Class of 2001 in Cass Lake, and another fifteen Indian kids dropped out of school during the eleventh grade, for a total of 46 dropouts: a devastating 84% of the 52 Indian kids who had begun their secondary education in Cass Lake five years earlier.

Statistics are an official record of someone counting something.  They provide a glimpse into the day-to-day realities of kids sitting in classrooms—or ‘skipping school’—but clearly do not tell the whole story.  Minnesota’s Indian school enrollment statistics are derived from ADM counts, made near the beginning of the school year in October, and each “Indian student” officially enrolled in school means thousands of dollars in revenues for the school district.  As Press/ON reported in April 1999, “tribes are … notorious for over-stating their enrollments”; anecdotal information indicates that Indian enrollment figures for some of the public schools may also be inflated: an official head-count of 52 seniors does not mean that there are fifty-two Indian kids regularly attending high school.

A closer examination of the statistics for the Minneapolis public schools—the largest Indian school district in the state—reveals the inadequacies of statistical analysis.  The cumulative dropout rate for the Class of 1994 was 100%—and dropout rates for every Class of Indian kids going through the Minneapolis schools since then have been in excess of 100%; for the class of 1996 the dropout rate was 179%.  It is unlikely that hundreds of Indian families are moving to Minneapolis from South Dakota, Chicago, and elsewhere out-of-state, and enrolling their kids in a school district which all but guarantees they will fail, although Indians do move to the Twin Cities from other states, and all too often their kids do drop out of school.

There are problems with the state of Minnesota’s educational system; the problems are serious enough so that more than two-thirds of the Indian kids in this state do not graduate from high school, and far too many of them drop out of school unable to read or do simple math.  But, while the numbers clearly show that there are serious problems with Indian education in Minnesota, official statistics indicating that the Twin Cities metro area schools are failing Indian students more than all of the time (cumulative dropout rates in the St. Paul schools also exceeded 100% seven out of the past eight years) also reflect inaccuracies in the official statistics.  Some of the phenomenal dropout statistics come from inconsistencies in identifying a student as “Indian”; with the redefinition of “race” in the 2000 census, determining which “ethnic” category should be used for official counts of students in Minnesota has become even more ambiguous.

Are some school districts failing Indian students more than 100% of the time?  No: despite the odds, about a third of Indian students succeed in graduating from high school.  But, there are problems.

Local school boards, Indian parents, people in the Indian community, tribal governments, and the state CF&L need to recognize that serious problems exist, to identify the problems—and to take responsibility.  There were more Indian high school graduates twenty years ago, than there are today.  Indian kids are failing in school—but Minnesota’s school system is also failing Indian kids, their families, and the community.  As we enter the new millennium, the time has come to acknowledge the problems of Indian education honestly, and to address them.