McCain Would Undermine Indian Schools with ESA Vouchers

While South Dakota’s Republicans use stealth vouchers to undermine public education and line the pockets of their friends in the insurance industry, Arizona Senator John McCain is trying to gut federal Indian schools with a voucher plan. S. 2711, the Native American Education Opportunity Act, would send 90% of the Bureau of Indian Education’s funding to education savings accounts for Indian students, who could then use that money for private school tuition. South Dakota’s American Indian students would not be able to take advantage of this plan, since we are not among the four states (Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, and Nevada) that have education savings accounts.

Of course, handing kids money won’t make a quality private school magically materialize right across the street:

Navajo Nation Schools Superintendent Tommy Lewis said Friday that while he thinks charter schools do a good job, there are challenges facing Native families – like transportation – that could present problems. BIE schools provide transportation for students, he noted, but parents would have to provide their own transportation to get a student to a private school that could be miles away.

“How Native tribes could participate is yet to be known,” Lewis said [Danika Worthington, “McCain Bill Diverts Indian School Funds from BIE,” Cronkite News via Indianz.com, 2016.03.22].

Just as South Dakota has an obligation to provide free, universal K-12 education to all of its students, the federal government has an obligation to provide free and universal K-12 education to American Indian students. The federal government has failed to provide that education for 140 years. The solution, however, is not to take away the money, throw it into bank accounts that would be at least as hard to supervise as the Bureau of Indian Education, and hope that other schools pop up to meet Indian students’ needs. The solution is to meet our obligations to build a public education system that provides the best education any student could ask for.

It’s like dinner: even if you’re a bad cook, you don’t just hand ten bucks to your kids and tell them to go buy their own dinner. You buy some groceries, find some decent recipes, and feed your kids yourself. (And if you’re doing it right, cooking at home is cheaper than going out.)

We won’t educate Indian kids by handing them checks and telling them to buy their own schooling, especially when private alternative schools will cost too much in tuition and travel. We will educate Indian kids by educating Indian kids. The federal government delivers quality K-12 education on its military base schools; it can make the same effort for American Indian schools.