Madison Coombs

I HAVE JUST finished a project which called for examining most of the literature of the last ten years which the U. S. Office of Education’s Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) has on the education of Indian Americans. In addition, I have perused a good many documents which have not yet found their way into that information sharing system. Among the latter have been: the monumental Equality of Educational Opportunity by James S. Coleman and others, now familiarly known as the "Coleman Report;" the report of the Special Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education, titled, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge; and, the Report issued by the National Council on Indian Opportunity in January of this year.

My principal conclusion after all this reading is that the truth is a fragile thing—particularly when issues become emotional and opinions and theories become doctrinaire. I am neither so naive nor so vain as to believe that I have the wit or wisdom to set things straight. But obviously there are a good many facts being ignored which should be heard and I must try to present them. The idea is being encouraged, from a good many sources, that Indian people have been badly miseducated, have not progressed educationally, and, as a result are at the absolute bottom of the barrel among the country’s ethnic minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged groups.

A more recent, but ardent and powerful, purveyor of this notion was the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education by means of its final report which appeared last November. The report which included no less than 60 recommendations for the reform of Indian education, many of them no doubt excellent, was wholly condemnatory of both the public and the Federal schools’ efforts to educate Indian children. The judgment of the Subcommittee was unbelievably negative. As proof of utter failure, the report claims that the dropout rates for Indian children are twice the national average in both public and Federal schools; that Indian children fall progressively farther behind white students the longer they remain in school, that only one percent of Indian children in elementary school have Indian teachers or principals, that one-fourth of elementary and secondary teachers—by their own admission—would prefer not to teach Indian children, and that Indian children, more than any other minority group, believe themselves to be "below average" in intelligence. The report also said that 40,000 Navajo Indians, nearly a third of the tribe, are functional illiterates in English, and that the average educational level for all Indians under Federal supervision is five school years.

The National Council on Indian Opportunity, quite obviously following the Senate Subcommittee’s lead, reiterated many of the Subcommittee’s recommendations in its report. It claimed that "a full generation of Indian adults have been severely damaged by an unresponsive and destructive educational system" and said that "Indians are lost at the lowest level of achievement of any group within our society."

There is no question but that Indian Americans are among the most seriously disadvantaged of all American citizens and that their children suffer from a most grievous educational disadvantage. In my work as a specialist and administrator with the BIA I helped to point out and document this disadvantage many times. My complaint about the reports of both the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education and the National Council on Indian Opportunity is not that I disagree with them basically, but that they are overstated, slanted, and in same cases downright inaccurate. They are totally negative and are intended to be. And in being so they obscure the encouraging advances which Indian people are making in education, largely through their own efforts. I have spent enough time around Washington to know the difference between research and polemics and later I will point out evidence that the purposes of the Senate Subcommittee were well set before its hearings began. I contend, however, that the denigrating of Indian education accomplishment in order to secure institutional change or to advance social theory may well have become counterproductive so far as Indian morale is concerned. No people can enjoy being told repeatedly that they are the lowest of the low when they are trying to work their way up—and especially when it isn’t so.

By a number of quantitative measures, the educational gains of Indian people during the past ten years have been substantial and even dramatic. In 1968, 152,000 Indian children between the ages of 6 and 18 were in what the BIA refers to as its "service population," that is, Indian people for whom the BIA provides educational services, either directly or by financial aid to public schools. In 1961, only 125,000 children were in this age span—an increase of 27,000 children in seven years. Of 152,000 school-aged Indian children in 1968, nearly 143,000, or 94%, were enrolled in school. Of the 125,000 in 1961, only 113,000 or 90% were in school. In other words, in seven years’ time, the public and Federal schools had absorbed an additional 27,000 Indian children, had increased the school enrollment from 90 to 94%, and had reduced the out-of-school figure from 10,000 to 7,000. Also, during that time the proportion of Indian children enrolled in public schools had increased from 57 to 61 %, and that in BIA and mission schools had decreased from 35 to 33% and from 8 to 6%, respectively.

An even more notable case of improvement in school enrollment is provided by the Navajo Tribe. In reference to this, the Senate Subcommittee report makes the niggling comment that: "In 1953, the BIA began a crash program to improve education for Navajo children. Between then and 1967, supervisory positions in BIA headquarters increased 113%; supervisory positions in BIA schools increased 144%; administrative and clerical positions in the BIA schools increased 94%. Yet teaching positions increased only 20%." That is all it has to say about the Navajo Emergency Education Program which came close to bringing universal education to the Navajo Tribe. In 1946, only 6,000 Navajo children between the ages of 6 and 18 were in school; an estimated 18,000 were not. By 1968, nearly 43,000 of 47,000 school-aged Navajo children were in school—or more than 90%.

A recent study has shown that Navajo youth are now finishing high school at a rate of 70%. One would think that that achievement would have been worthy of comment, particularly since the major share of the credit belongs to the Navajo Tribe itself which promotes education among its people most energetically. So far as the fussy comment about the large increase in administrative and supervisory staff is concerned and the relatively low increase in the number of teachers, there are adequate answers. Much of the new Navajo school enrollment went into public schools with the Federal government providing the funds for the teachers who were on public school payrolls. The new Assistant Commissioner for Education, who arrived in 1966 and was one of the few persons connected with the BIA that the Senate Subcommittee approved of, expressed consternation at the low number of supervisory positions in the headquarters office and brought about at least a 113% increase before leaving a year later in 1967.

There simply are no adequate data to support the Senate Subcommittee’s statement that the average educational level for all Indians under Federal supervision is five years. Leaving out of consideration the question of what is meant by "under Federal supervision," neither the State Departments of Education nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs have suitable data-gathering capabilities to provide this kind of information and have been criticized for this lack. In the meantime, the most reliable data come from the decennial United States Census of Population conducted by the U. S. Bureau of Census. The 1960 census revealed that the average number of years of schooling for all Indian adults was 8.4 years, compared with a national figure of 10.6 years. For the crucial young adult population, 14-24 years of age, the figure for Indians was 9.0 years compared with 10.8 for the general population. Ten years earlier in 1950 the comparable figures had been 7.9 years and 10.5 years. So, in the decade of the ‘50s the young adult group gained an average 1.1 years of schooling and a net gain of .8 year by comparison with the general population. In addition, the 1960 census showed that there were 57,000 Indian people in the country who had graduated from high school as compared with 24,000 in 1950, an increase of 140%. And 17,000 Indian people in 1960 had completed one or more years of college compared with 6,500 in 1950, an increase of 160%. In 1968, BIA high schools graduated 2,041 students, compared with 841 ten years earlier. The exact number of Indian students graduating from public and private high schools each year is not known but, based upon the proportions of enrollment in the several types of schools, it has been conservatively estimated that at least 5,000 Indian students received high school diplomas in 1968. This is being written at an awkward time as the 1970 census is being taken and 1960 data are obviously badly out of date. It is quite predictable that in 1970 the level of educational attainment of both Indians and the general population will show an increase in absolute terms. I think it is safe to predict that Indian people will also register another net gain on the general population. Since the Senate Subcommittee apparently seeks to distinguish between Indian people "under Federal supervision" and those who are not, it should be pointed out that as Indian people become better educated they tend to move out from under "Federal supervision."

The Senate Subcommittee has said that the Indian school dropout rate is twice the national average and the National Council on Indian Opportunity says that between 50 and 60% of Indian students drop out of school. Until recently, reliable statistics on the dropout rate of Indian students have not been available. In 1959, while an education specialist on the BIA’s Washington staff, I did a status study of the dropout question, using such data as were available, and estimated that 60% of Indian school pupils were dropping out of school before high school graduation. I made clear the limitations of the study. I now still have that figure quoted back to me by people who have no idea of its source, as if it were gospel. Fortunately, within the last year and a half, we have had reports on two well-planned and well-executed longitudinal dropout studies in which we can place some reliance.

These separate but coordinated studies by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory at Portland, Oregon, and the Southwestern Cooperative Educational Laboratory at Albuquerque, commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, can be considered together. Between the two, a scientifically selected sample of 2,057 Indians, who had been enrolled in the eighth grade in the fall of 1962, were traced individually through their school careers. Of this total, 840 were studied by the Northwest Laboratory in the public, private and Federal schools in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The Southwestern Laboratory studies 1,217 Indian students in the schools of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, southern Colorado, and southern Utah.

The investigators found that after five years (six years in the Southwestern study) of the composite group of 2,057 students, 1,177 or 57.2% had either graduated from high school or were still in school and presumably would graduate. Ten or .5% were deceased and 870 or 42.3% had dropped out. There was a higher rate of dropout in the northwestern states which was fixed at 47.7%. In the southwestern states it was found that only 38.7% had dropped out. The comparable national dropout rate at that time was slightly more than 26%.

The Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education was quite correct when it says that Indian children fall progressively farther behind white children the longer they stay in school. As a review of the literature will show, my colleagues and I at the University of Kansas first documented this phenomenon in 1958 and it has been confirmed by a number of later studies. What the Senate Subcommittee did not say is that Coleman, reporting on a study of 600,000 American school children in 1965, shows conclusively that the same thing happens to every other disadvantaged minority group. The Coleman study makes very clear that we are dealing with a problem here which is much larger and more fundamental than the miseducation of a particular ethnic group by a particular school system. It says, "At the twelfth grade, results of tests in the same verbal and nonverbal skills show that, in every case, the minority scores are farther below the majority than are the first graders. For some groups the relative decline is negligible: for others it is large."

Most unexpected of all, perhaps, was the revelation that of the disadvantaged ethnic minorities (excluding Oriental Americans), the Indian Americans achieved highest, not lowest. The report says, "The order of the racial and ethnic groups is nearly the same on all tests. Following the whites in order are Orientals, Indians, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes." In a continuing study and analysis of the Coleman data, the U. S. Office of Education has said:

Coleman concludes that the educational deficits of minority group children stem from the inequities of our total society and that the schools have not so far been successful in eliminating them. The Coleman Report was available to the Senate Subcommittee during its entire investigation of Indian education. So far as I can remember, it never refers to it by name although obviously several of its references are extracted from it. It seems strange that it would not have commented on the performance of Indian children as compared with other minority groups somewhere in its report.

The educational progress which Indian people are making is, perhaps, least satisfying with respect to college enrollment and college graduation. Educational deficits tend to be cumulative with older students. But even here there are grounds for satisfaction and again there is better information than was the case a year or so ago about Indian education beyond high school, vocational-technical as well as collegiate. As they did with high school dropouts, the Northwest Laboratory and the Southwestern Laboratory have done coordinated studies in this field, in the same states in which they conducted their dropout studies.

The Northwest Laboratory made individual studies of 287 Indian high school graduates and found that 202, or slightly more than 70%, pursued some kind of educational course beyond high school. Of these, 106 or 52% completed the course of training they entered. Of the entire group of 287, 83 or nearly 30% entered college, and of these 24 graduated and received degrees. This represented 8.3% of the total number of high school graduates in the study, 11.8% of those who pursued further training, and 29% of those who entered college. The Southwestern Laboratory reported that of 384 Indian high school graduates studied, 285 or 74% continued their education beyond high school and of these 197 or 69%, completed either a vocational-technical program or graduated from college. This represented 51% of all the students in the study. A total of 44% of the graduates completed vocational programs and 7% graduated from college.

During the 1968-69 school year, the BIA awarded scholarship grants-in-aid totaling more than $3 million to approximately 3,100 Indian college students. Tribal scholarships totaling at least $1.1 million and grants from private sources helped hundreds more. BIA estimates conservatively that there were at least 4,400 Indian students in college in 1968-69. Other estimates place the figure much higher. In addition, the BIA provides vocational-technical training for about 3,600 high school graduates at Haskell Institute, The Institute of American Indian Arts, or through its vocational training program.

Three of the Senate Subcommittee’s criticisms will be taken up briefly. The Coleman Report showed that only I% of the Indian children in the study in the elementary grades and 2% of those in high school had Indian teachers. Everyone agrees that there are not enough professionally trained Indian teachers. That situation will improve as the college graduation picture improves. Most of the Indian children in the Coleman Study were in public schools—in fact, Indian students were the most "integrated" group in the study. The BIA found in 1968 that 16% of its professional teachers were of Indian descent, as were 27% of its administrators and supervisors and 92% of its paraprofessional instructional aides.

The Senate Subcommittee’s statement that one-fourth of their teachers would prefer not to be teaching Indian children is confused and misleading. A close reading of the Coleman Report throws a much less ominous light on the matter. All teachers in the study were asked whether they would prefer to teach white children. About one-fourth of the teachers of Indian children said that they would (almost exactly the same percentage as for the teachers of Mexican American students) compared with more than one-third of the teachers of white children. Taken as a whole, this shows some positive orientation of the teachers of Indian children toward their pupils.

Earlier I suggested that the Senate Subcommittee had in mind a definite goal when it began its life, in addition to any other beneficent objective it may have had on behalf of Indians. That goal was the dissolution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or at least the reconstitution of the Federal effort in Indian education by transferring it to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The Senate Subcommittee report does a rather good job of documenting this itself on pages 1 and 2 and again on pages 189-198. The question of organizational location was raised by two members of the Senate Subcommittee on Education (as distinguished from the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education) in April, 1966, when the question of the BIA’s participation in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was before them. As a result, an interdepartmental study group took the question to a meeting of Indian representatives in Denver in November, 1966. 1 was at that meeting and I can testify that the answer of the Indians to the proposal for transfer was an unqualified "no," which was reported to the Senate in May, 1967. The Senate Subcommittee report says only that the recommendation against transfer "cited the recently improved coordination between the two Departments as reasons." The creation of the Special Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education soon followed receipt of the Interdepartmental Report.

In 1967 a "hush hush" White House Task Force, in a report never released to the public, recommended to the President the transfer of all BIA functions, including education, to HEW, and in February of that year the Secretary of the Department of HEW met with Indian representatives at Kansas City and broached the idea of transfer. The reaction of the Indian representatives was so overwhelmingly negative that no more was said about it at that time and the National Council on Indian Opportunity was formed the following year.

With the change of administrations, Alvin M. Josephy recommended independent agency status for the BIA or, alternatively, transfer to HEW. Again, the National Congress of American Indians, meeting at Albuquerque in October, 1969, rejected this proposal in its Resolution No. 6. Significantly, the resolution stated that, "Indians tribally and individually are making progress."

The fate of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is not the point of this article. While recognizing the pros and cons, I have, on balance, rather favored transfer of Indian education to the U. S. Office of Education, perhaps for selfish personal and professional reasons. But, having spoken quite clearly on three separate occasions, it is clear that Indians do not want transfer. And people who do a great deal of talking about Indian self-determination had better start listening to them. In the end, the Senate Subcommittee made no recommendation about transfer—it could not very well do so in view of the NCAI resolution.

In the end, however, the Senate Subcommittee may have accomplished by indirection what it did not do directly—by painting such a black picture of ineptitude, rigidity, and unconcern on the part of the BIA that that agency’s ability to function effectively is no longer credible in the minds of many people and it ceases to be viable.

Perhaps that doesn’t matter either. What does matter is the credibility of the ability of Indian people to progress. They have proved that they can and are doing so and it is time that we let the country know about it.