Students in federal Bureau of Indian Education schools test two grade levels below the national average, data reveals

Chart by ProPublica and The Arizona Republic

Students in federal Bureau of Indian Education schools get slightly better test scores than Native students in local public schools, but still score well below the national average on standardized tests, ProPublica and The Arizona Republic found in the first-ever analysis of BIE students' scores.

The BIE has long failed to obey the federal law requiring all schools to report publicly "how well they help children learn . . . despite repeated warnings about the quality of education Native American children receive in its schools," reporters Alden Woods and Agnel Philip report.

After analyzing 200,000 scores going back nine years, with Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, they found "above-average learning rates for students in the BIE’s classrooms compared to Native students who attended nearby public schools . . . but the analysis also revealed an achievement gap that even the BIE’s highest-performing schools cannot close," they report. "BIE students performed more than two grade levels below the national average on standardized tests. And compared to Native students attending the nearest public school district, the BIE students still remained nearly one-third of a grade level behind."

The reporters write that the results indicate "that the pace of learning in nearly all BIE schools wasn’t rapid enough to compensate for centuries of disinvestment in tribal communities and families or a lack of early childhood learning opportunities, which contribute to many BIE students being behind schedule academically by the time standardized testing begins in the third grade."

“We have kindergarteners that are two years behind,” Charles Cuny Jr., superintendent of Little Wound School, a tribally controlled school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, told the reporters. “The question is, how are you two years behind in kindergarten?”