Weekly Update

Winona Hastings and her daughters walk through the village of Supai on their way to the Havasupai Head Start and Early Start Program in the village. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report

How a tribe won a legal battle against the federal Bureau of Indian Education — and still lost

In 2017, six Havasupai families sued the federal government, alleging that the Bureau of Indian Education, which operates Havasupai Elementary and is housed within the Interior Department, deprived their children of their federal right to an education. The tribe, in a brief supporting the lawsuit, argued that the bureau had allowed Havasupai Elementary to become “the worst school in a deplorable BIE system” and that court intervention was required to protect students from the agency.

The families eventually secured two historic settlements that fueled hopes across Indian Country that true reform might finally improve outcomes both in Supai and perhaps also at BIE schools throughout the U.S. So far, the settlements have brought new staff to Supai, and the BIE had to reconstitute the school board. Teachers now must use lesson plans, and they finally have a curriculum to use in English, science and math classes. A new principal pledged to stay longer than a school year.

The legal wins followed an effort to reform the BIE as a whole. In 2014, federal officials unveiled a sweeping plan to overhaul the beleaguered bureau, which had long struggled to deliver better student outcomes with anemic funding. If the BIE were a state, the schools it operates would rank at or very near the bottom of any list for academic achievement.

But in the past decade, and after a nearly doubling of its budget, the BIE has finally started to make some progress. Graduation rates have improved, staff vacancies are down and the bureau built its own data system to track and support student achievement across its 183 campuses in 23 different states. Now, those milestones could be at risk.

Tracking Trump: His actions on education 

The president has said he wants to eliminate the Education Department while fighting "woke" ideology in schools. Here's a week-by-week look at what he’s done.

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