If you had any doubts about the value of South Dakota News Watch’s effort to provide independent long-form journalism, those doubts should disappear before these bold opening lines of Nick Lowrey’s big report on South Dakota’s failure to educate 9% of its people. Failure—that’s Lowrey’s word:
The South Dakota constitution demands that state government provide equal opportunity to education for all of its citizens, yet for decades Native Americans – who make up 9% of the population – have been left behind by a system that fails to meet their needs and has resulted in generations of Natives suffering the consequences of inadequate educational achievement.
The systematic failure to properly educate Native American students is seen as a major source of devastating later-in-life consequences that have plagued Native people and communities for decades: generational poverty, high unemployment, substance abuse, high incarceration rates and reduced life expectancy [Nick Lowrey, “Native American Students Left Behind by S.D. Education System,” South Dakota News Watch, 2019.11.13].
Journalist Lowrey doesn’t couch that judgment behind Some people say or Advocates contend or Teachers and students feel. There’s no infinitely regressive relativism bracketing this “failure” in one person’s opinion marks. Journalist Lowrey offers his own objective assessment that South Dakota is doing something wrong, committing a grave injustice against tens of thousands of South Dakotans, and that we have a constitutional obligation to correct that injustice.
Independent journalism is part of that correction process. Lowrey lays out the history, the data, and the experts that support his statement that we are failing Native American students. In a second article, Lowrey presents educational alternatives that appear to be working for tribal youth. And in two articles coming up as part of this series next week, Lowrey promises to “look at reforms that could vastly improve Native education in South Dakota, and an examination of a proposal for Native-focused charter schools in S.D.”
That thorough, detailed, and clearly advocative reporting is more informative and relevant than almost anything you will read on Twitter or Facebook this weekend. Lowrey’s reporting provides more fodder for meaningful public policy discussion than most of what you will see on South Dakota’s TV stations this week. South Dakota News Watch provides the thoughtful journalism necessary for our statewide community to recognize the big problems it faces and make intelligent decisions about how to solve them.
It’s apparent that Indians aren’t welcome in South Dakota, which is quite ironic. Best advice. Move to Colorado where you may be happier.
Here are just a few of the organizations based in Colorado supporting Native American & Indigenous community, events, scholarships and more:
https://www.colorado.edu/cnais/resources/colorado-community-resources
Utter BS Porter. Do me a favor. Go interview Sioux Falls Public Schools and the principals and get the data on Native students. It is NOT that the teachers do not want to educate them.
Do me a favor? You first.
Yes, there is failure going on, but there are successes as well. I was a school board member in Rapid City, and I saw both. A lot of times the news will focus on the failure. That’s understandable, because there is no one who wants any child to fail, but when we do this we don’t elevate those Lakota and Dakota kids who are doing great, academically and every other way. And, as always, we never hear about the kids who sometimes stumble, but get back up and keep trying.
I can tell you that a big issue is that Indian students tend to be more mobile. They will spend a few years at the reservation schools, come to Rapid for a few years, and repeat. In the elementary school my daughter attended half the students would come or go in one year. That sort of mobility and how to address it is one key we have to figure out. Kids who change schools a lot are going to miss lessons and may have as much as a half year to catch up. It gets demoralizing for any student to be behind their classmates.
Poor people and minorities have more difficulty finding housing and employment, and it may be temporary or inadequate, making moving every year or two more likely. Every time a student changes schools, there are challenges and missed lessons. When I studied this mobility at my daughter’s east-side school, the students who were poor, but had been at the school from 1st to 4th grade did as well as the wealthier students from west of the gap. Stable housing, I think, is a big factor. I realize that more mobility is part of the culture of Indians, though.
I think a key is to try to have social and economic policies that allow for families to have less mobility, and to provide ways to better address the affects of mobility. Common Core was one approach that was meant to do this.
My daughter was sick for a week one year. She missed the introduction to math story problems, and she was, for the first time, sort of lost in this subject. She refused to do her math homework, which she always did at the kitchen table. I had an idea. We took the math book under the table, and we did math together there. It was just what she needed to stop thinking about how far behind she was, and just have fun with math again. “Daddy,” she said, “this is fun: math under the table.” It only took three days for her to catch up, but what if she were a couple months behind? She would have thought it was hopeless, and this was a super smart girl.
How much of reservation schools is the state’s responsibility and how much is federal?
I taught in 2 schools that were almost exclusively American Indian. Crow Creek was a federal reservation school South of Highmore, next to the Brule reservations just north of Chamberlain.
I was stunned by the intelligence of those high school kids, their creativity, athletic ability and caring for one another. Some went on to be successful, but there was so little support for them. It is such a great loss for SD to squander those gifts.
Don is right about the mobility. It’s not only from reservation to city, but state to state. Students went from Crow Creek to Standing Rock to the Diné Nation in Arizona and back at any time in the school year.
The other school I taught at was a private religious boarding school in Springfield, St. Mary’s School for Indian Girls. The white couple who ran it were incredibly corrupt. It closed about the time the prison opened up there. They were simply grifters who’d found easy marks. Nasty people.
Letter to the Editor
In the wake of the GEAR UP tragedy, no one has ever come forward with an honest, accurate number of deserving Native American kids who actually went to college. This is despite our state government blowing through about $60 million of our state and federal tax dollars. High-placed bureaucrats claimed preposterous conflicts of interest were “business as usual.” Auditors failed their professional and ethical obligations. Politicians suddenly came down with amnesia. Consultants laughed all the way to the bank with their ill-gotten millions. While thousands of our young people got cheated out of a chance for a better future, no one ever spent a single night in jail. It was convenient to blame it all on the dead guy and move on. Will our state’s Native American children and our taxpayers suffer again from such scandals? Yes they will, unless we find ways to prevent such abuses of public trust from happening again. If you have suggestions for meaningful changes—in rules, laws, or oversight procedures—please consider sharing them with us asap. If you wish, we will keep your identity confidential. We will not attribute your comments to you in any way. We will present our findings and proposals to legislators and other public officials for their review and action in the 2020 legislative session.
Frank Kloucek
email: fkloucek@hotmail.com
29966 423rd Avenue
Scotland, SD 57059
605-660-0254
Jack Billion
email: jackbillion@sio.midco.net
400 E. 21st Street
Sioux Falls, SD 57105
605-212-2084
Great letter, Frank and Jack.
South Dakotans, grab this opportunity to clean up your state, offer a better future to your children and start getting more bang for your tax buck.
Frank and Jack raise a good point, and it is something that is pointed to in the article as a potential solution: a charter school for Native American students. I am all for innovation in education, but I also am all for local control of our schools. Too often when the responsibility shifts from a local school board for what goes in in our schools, bad things happen — especially when that shift goes to people who are looking to make a profit from the situation. I also believe it takes a community to fully realize and address the deep issues hampering the success of students of that community.
I would also caution against the “white savior” swooping in to “fix the problems of the Indian” — that has not gone well in the past.
Cory, after the tragedy in Platte, and for the intended Indian beneficiaries, was there a Fed investigation of Gearup fund management and could you link us once again? Thx
Good on Frank and Jack. Yet SD GOP and friends are demonstrable pros at the coverup.
“o” is correct. Charter schools, generally, have no better track record in education, and there is a lot less accountability. That’s how GEAR UP got so far down the road of corruption. Great White Fathers haven’t done a very good job of fixing much of anything these days.
Public charter schools for one race have another problem. They can be seen as a means to segregate or re-segregate schools. That’s not a legacy we want to re-invent. If a public charter school was established, it would have to provide some reasonable balance between races. Some attempts at this are done with Spanish-English language schools, where Spanish-speaking and English-speaking children learn to read, write and communicate in two languages. It could be done with a uniques curriculum, but not everyone will be able to get into a charter school. That’s why I like the idea of testing out various approaches, particularly those brought forward by Indian parents and educators, inside the current public school system.
https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/02/21/oglala-sioux-tribe-seeks-investigation-i.asp
From the above link….. Phelps and Westerhuis aren’t mentioned in Senate Concurrent Resolution 5, which is being considered by the Senate State Affairs Committee at a Wednesday morning meeting. Instead, the tribe names a slew of former state officials, including Keith Moore, who served as an advisor to the company that tied to the GEAR UP scam.
Moore, who is a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, previously served as the director of Indian education for the state of South Dakota and as the director of the BIE. His stint at the BIE, a federal agency that’s part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, resulted in an investigation into ethical lapses but federal prosecutors declined to file charges.
There might be more info in the link above, Leslie.
GEAR UP shows South Dakota’s sordid history of securing federal assistance under the promise that we will educate our tribal students, only to then hand that money to cronies who put as much of that money as they can in their pockets. The Department of Education didn’t oversee, didn’t impose any rigorous measurements of the effective spending of those dollars.
Steve Pearson, I recognize that you’re trying to blame Indian children for their inadequate education.
(1) Racist.
(2) Lowrey in his articles is debunking that poor excuse.
(3) The South Dakota Constitution does not excuse the state from educating children in difficult circumstances or children from cultures or communities we might prefer to ignore or oppress. Children of people like Steve Pearson may find it very difficult to learn in school because after every day of the teachers’ hard work, they come home to angry, bigoted parents who call the teachers liars, who deny science, who deride intellect, and who model at every turn the sort of Trumpist-insult rage that undermines the civil society our Founders called on us to preserve and promote. Nonetheless, we must educate those children. Our obligation to educate applies to every child, so we can save them from the anger and counterproductivity that people like Steve Pearson would teach them.