A Democratic U.S. senator and a Native American education advocate said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for dismantling the U.S. Education Department could have disastrous impacts on Native students.
Trump signed the order Thursday, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives. He has derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce a bill to achieve that.
The department, however, is not set to close completely. The White House said the department will retain certain critical functions. Trump said his administration will close the department beyond its “core necessities," preserving its responsibilities for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants and money for children with disabilities. The White House said earlier it would also continue to manage federal student loans.
The president blamed the department for America’s lagging academic performance and said states will do a better job.
“It’s doing us no good," he said at a White House ceremony.
However, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawai‘i, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said Thursday that Trump’s order effectively violates the government’s federal trust and treaty responsibilities to tribes to provide education.
“The Department of Education plays a critical role in Native education, on everything from special education and Impact Aid to Native language revitalization,” he said in a news release. “Without a functional Department of Education, Native students – more than 90 percent of whom attend public schools – will be at the mercy of state governments that have no legal responsibility to meet their needs.”
The Education Department sends billions of dollars a year to schools and oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student loans.
Currently, much of the agency’s work revolves around managing money — both its extensive student loan portfolio and a range of aid programs for colleges and school districts, such as school meals and support for homeless students. The agency also is key in overseeing civil rights enforcement.
Schatz called the order a “betrayal of a sacred federal promise.”
“We have a duty to fight this reckless plan and protect Native students,” he said.
More than 92 percent of Native students attend public and charter K-12 schools, not Bureau of Indian Education schools, Schatz said.
Abolishing the Education Department would slash funding for Native students in public, charter and BIE schools, which rely on resources like Individuals with Disabilities Education Act special education services, Impact Aid, English Language Learner supports, and Every Student Succeeds Act Title VI Indian education programs.
“It would also mean less dedicated funding for teachers, sports, building repairs, school meal programs, transportation, and after-school tutoring/activities – leaving Native students with fewer educational opportunities,” Schatz said.
Already, the Trump administration has been gutting the agency. Its workforce is being slashed in half, and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights.
Advocates for public schools said eliminating the department would leave children behind in an American education system that is fundamentally unequal.
“This is a dark day for the millions of American children who depend on federal funding for a quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said.
Democrats said the order will be fought in the courts and in Congress, and they urged Republicans to join them in opposition. The department was “founded in part to guarantee the enforcement of students’ civil rights,” said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Champions of public school segregation objected, and campaigned for a return to ‘states’ rights.’”
Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and chief executive officer of the American Indian College Fund, said Native American students should not be considered as members of a racial group, such as Black or Hispanic students, but rather as members of politically distinct sovereign nations with rights secured by treaties.
“We gave up land and resources in order for the United States to be founded and grow as a country,” she said. “We’re having to deal with that lack of knowledge on the part of many people."
Native American students should be exempt from blanket attacks on programs and funding that serve minority and other vulnerable students, she said.
“We want to be allies with all of our other allies who are being attacked,” she said during a virtual panel discussion Thursday on efforts to protect minority students against federal policies. “At the same time we have a different status that we have to advocate for.”
She said further gutting or eliminating the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights would hurt Native American students, who rely on the office to ensure they are treated fairly. Native American students are suspended and expelled from schools at disproportionately high rates, studies have shown, including a recent study from WestEd.
Crazy Bull also expressed concern about the Trump administration cutting funding to the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.
“The loss of data is going to have a great impact on our ability to evaluate how our institutions are dealing with students and how investment should be made,” she said.
And she said she worries the nation’s 35 tribal colleges and universities also could see further funding cuts as a result of Trump’s executive order. She said federal education funds account for roughly 74 percent of funds for those institutions, and some of those schools get 90 percent of their funding from federal sources.
“Many of the institutions are at risk of having their programs decimated by the loss of funding,” she said.
Trump’s recent decision to lay off hundreds of thousands of federal probationary employees especially impacted the country’s only two federally operated tribal higher education institutions, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque and Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, both of which lost nearly one-fourth of their employees as a result of the federal layoffs.
ProPublica published a report last year that showed tribal colleges and universities are perpetually underfunded by Congress despite federal legislation, as well as treaties, that have promised them adequate education funding. Those institutions receive a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses, the nonprofit investigative news organization found. Those funding gaps have led to broken water pipes, leaking roofs and failing ventilation systems.
Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that state funds and private donations make up a miniscule portion of tribal college and university funding, meaning the loss of federal funding likely would be disastrous for those institutions, ProPublica found.
“You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,” Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C., told ProPublica. “That’s incredibly concerning.”
Schatz said eliminating the Education Department, which administers federal loans and Pell grants, could impact Native students’ ability to access college financial aid. And he echoed Crazy Bull’s concerns about the impact of Trump’s order on tribal colleges and universities.
“Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), which depend on federal dollars for nearly three-quarters of their funding, could face catastrophic cuts if states decide not to maintain critical funding – pushing many to the brink of collapse and jeopardizing educational opportunities for future generations,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published by ICT and is republished with permission. To view the original story, visit https://ictnews.org/news/betrayal-of-a-sacred-federal-promise.
