Tribal educators defend against DOGE crusade for “school choice” - Part I
Hear from tribal educators who reject Trump’s EO to create a “school choice” voucher program in Bureau of Indian Education, which threatens to bleed the chronically underfunded Indian education system
In mid-March, hundreds of tribal leaders and Indigenous school principals, teachers, and parents across Turtle Island voiced their objection to President Donald Trump’s ill-defined “school choice” executive order (EO) for Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools during a nationwide tribal consultation. Speaking from their school offices or classrooms, they almost all uniformly rejected Trump’s EO that aspires to remove Native students from rural BIE schools to “private, faith-based, or public charter schools” in so-called nearby areas, ostensibly by diverting funds from BIE-funded schools.
“If you start tearing up tribally controlled grant schools and BIE schools, you’re tearing up communities,” said Hector Serna, superintendent and high school principle of Mandaree School District in Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. In mid-February, Trump’s large-scale staff reductions terminated about a quarter of staff at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico, prompting Haskell students and three tribal nations to sue the Department of Interior and Office of Indian Affairs to challenge the layoffs in early March.
Trump’s dumbfounding EO inflicts immense uncertainty for tribes and over 47,000 Native students at over 180 elementary and secondary schools. These BIE schools, two-thirds of which are tribally-controlled, offer culturally-specific education like Indigenous language classes as well as employment opportunities for local Native teachers and administrators—markedly different from non-BIE schools.
Nevertheless Trump’s crusading MAGA republicans are eyeing the BIE to carryout Project 2025 and DOGE’s incompetent and ineffective witch hunt for U.S. government “fraud, waste, and abuse.” Tribal leaders and Indian education advocates have repeatedly called on lawmakers to fully-fund the BIE to meet tribal and student needs. But just as Trump demolishes the Department of Education (as planned by Project 2025) to return education authority to states, Indian BIE schooling may whither too. Project 2025 proposes an “Overhaul” of BIE, ostensibly by stripping crucial dollars needed to operate schools and diverting funds to a “federal education savings account” for each Native BIE student, modeled after an Arizona Indian voucher program.
“It is imperative that any effort to fund an Indian school choice initiative must not divert funds away from BIE-funded schools like ours,” said Joe Benally, principal of Piñon Community School in western Navajo Nation, northern Arizona. Unfortunately, Trump’s Project 2025 education proposals are entrenched in this misguided so-called ’school choice’ scheme to divert federal funding to private entities, and explains his executive orders “sunsetting” the Education Department and “helping children” at BIE.
The EO “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families” impacting BIE directs the Interior secretary to review and submit a plan detailing “educational options” nearby existing BIE-funded schools and identify what “mechanisms” are available for families of BIE-eligible students to use ‘their’ federal funding to attend alternative schools, including private, faith-based, or public charter schools.
“We have to remember that in Arizona, as they looked at vouchers, they created a deficit within their state,” said Ronalda Tome-Warito, Diné and Albuquerque Public School board member, during the tribal consultation. “And I think that with our [tribal] communities, we are going to create a great deficit for our children,” adding “Vouchers are—sometimes I think they are an easy fix that this administration would like to use.”
The EO is based upon Project 2025’s proposal calling for a voucher program modeled after Arizona’s state-funded Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program: “Federal officials should design a federal education savings account option for all children attending BIE schools,” (pg. 348-349). In 2024, as a result of Arizona’s ESA voucher spending, the state incurred a $1.4 billion budget deficit, while ESA voucher accounts had $360 million unspent. The mounting “budget meltdown” costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and has caused AZ lawmakers to slash critical state programs, like water infrastructure projects, according to ProPublica.
The unsound ESA program provides parents with a private bank account and debit card and allows them to use 90% of the funds that would typically go to the child’s public school to pay for an education of their “choice,” including tuition fees. Public school advocates say the voucher program takes vital funds from public schools and is a “handout to the wealthy,” subsidizing the private school education they could already afford. According to the Brookings Institute, families in the poorest communities are the least likely to obtain ESA funds.
Even if families wished to use these funds, what private schools are available and affordable to use diverted education funds? And would students meet the requirements of private schools? “Our school serves very rural parts of the Navajo Nation and we are often the only accessible school in the area for our families,” said David Nez, superintendent and principal at Pine Hill Schools, located in a satellite Navajo Nation reservation. “If a portion of all our funds were converted into vouchers, it is highly doubtful that these vouchers meaningfully make a difference to our students’ educational options,” adding “Vouchers do not adequately account for the admission requirements of private and sectarian schools such as grade point average or testing requirements.” The Pine Hills Schools are in a mountainous rural area in eastern New Mexico with the two nearest towns 60 miles away.
The Indian School Equalization Program (ISEP) funds the core budget of BIE elementary and secondary schools, covering sales for teachers, aids, principles, and other personnel as well as student transportation. Unfortunately, these funds are often reallocated to cover program cuts in different areas of education. BIE schools receive ISEP funding based on a formula calculating their average school attendance, weighted amounts based on school size and accessibility, and past attendance data—adding up to approximately $7,250 per student for 2024-2025. (In BIE jargon, ‘funding dollars per student’ is called the Weighted Student Unit). According to most recent data, the average public school spending per student reached $15,633 in 2022—over double the funding Native BIE students received.
“We are grossly underfunded compared to public schools,” said Nez.
According to the 2024 BIE budget report from the Department of the Interior, ISEP accounts for 43% of BIE’s budget, which is certainly a majority of funds facilitating teaching for students. The second most significant funding source comes from the Department of Education (DOE), which accounts for 20% of BIE’s budget and funds student education and services at BIE-funded elementary and secondary schools. These schools receive competitive grants from DOE and other federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Free and Reduced Meals programs.
“Tribal leaders and members of Congress have testified that current Weighted Student Unit [WSU] allocations are already insufficient and further cuts would force school closures within the reservations,” said Peter Lengkeek, chairman of the Crow Creek Tribe in Fort Thompson, South Dakota.
At this rate, BIE students would have fewer alternatives if forced to use the paltry ISEP funds that are half the allocation a public school student is ‘worth.’ If the Arizona voucher school system had $360 million of unspent funds because families still couldn’t afford to make up the difference for private school tuition or there weren’t alternative school options, then how could the Trump administration expect an Indian “school choice” program to succeed? And what about students whose only options are 30, 60, or 100 miles from their tribal communities?
“You will probably have to match the tuition of parochial, private, public schools, which are much higher than Native education,” said Salabye. “We do not have access to these alternatives,” adding “That should be clear to our leaders at the federal level.”
Of the nearly four dozen who spoke, tribal leaders and Native educators have overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s EO to create a ‘school choice’ voucher program for BIE, voicing it would “financially cripple” and “dismantle” Indian education, and that a voucher program would “require more, not less funding” for Native students. Thora Padilla, president of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, said, “No other school is capable of providing a culturally-relevant education.” Only two tribal leaders who spoke during the consultation supported the executive order if “school choice” means funding is increased for their schools or if funding isn’t diverted from their programs.
As No Frontiers continues to report, Donald Trump, Musk, and Vought’s promise to “dismantle the administrative state” and “expanding school choice” has threatened the foundation of the federal Indian trust responsibility—a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation to protect tribal trust lands, trust assets, as well as provide essential services across all departments. Many tribal leaders and educators also voiced their frustration with the “inadequate” and unlawful tribal consultation, which was scheduled after Trump signed an executive order to alter BIE funding and programing without prior informed consent and consultation with tribes. Most also firmly voiced that “no mechanisms exist” in law, regulation, or authority to divert funding from BIE schools to create an Indian ‘school choice’ program, arguing the creation of such a program would violate the federal Indian trust responsibility and tribal treaty rights.
“This voucher program is just another form of assimilation,” said Harvey Whitford (Blackfeet Indian Nation), superintendent and principal at Wa He Lut Indian School, whose mother was taken from her parents to an Indian boarding school. “This attempt of sending our Indian children to non-Indian schools is just a new modern day form of assimilating our Indian children into a real of non-Indian educational institutions.”
First and foremost, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the federal government and institute a Christian Nationalist agenda in all sectors of American life, a kind of assimilation tribal nations and Indigenous citizens are all too familiar with. While some of Project 2025’s policy proposals seem vague, broad, and unlimited, the goals are plainly written: defund all aspects of federal Indian administration, hand power to states, and deregulate tribal lands to easily access fossil fuel development, even on sacred sites and treaty lands. According to three Indian law and policy experts No Frontiers interviewed, the Heritage Foundation’s policy playbook would functionally sever the U.S. government’s obligations to provide essential federal programs and services.
While federal agencies remain indispensable partners for tribes, the federal Indian trust responsibility is often fulfilled when the federal government contracts with tribes to provide federal services owed to their citizens, including education and health care. The federal Indian trust responsibility is incompatible with so-called “state’s rights” supremacy, the end-game of Trump’s dismantling of DOE and other agencies and handing federal authority to states to govern a citizen’s most important constitutional rights and civil liberties. Tribes derive their sovereignty and authority from the federal government. If states are given that authority, they may seek to undermine tribal sovereignty in any aspect of governance imaginable.
“In places like South Dakota, where race—where state-tribal relations are at an all time low, this would have a very, very negative impact on our students,” said Lengkeek, adding “The race relations in this stage such as South Dakota would not provide a culturally responsive education to out students or provide the opportunity to engage in language, culture, or traditional teachings that we provide here within a reservation.”
Indian Country’s federal administration may seem isolated to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, but that is not the case. Each department and agency has federal Indian trust responsibilities, legislation, or rules and regulations that must square with tribal nations and Native citizens. An overhaul of the federal government at the magnitude of Project 2025 will inevitably impact tribal nations, whether or not it was written or intended.
In a letter sent in late-January to Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) argues that ‘school choice’ already exists for Native students through the passage of the Tribally Controlled Schools Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan. The Act empowers tribes to receive federal funds from BIE to operate their own schools and teach Native children in their communities and was hailed as a success in the U.S. government fulfilling its treaty and federal Indian trust responsibility to provide education for tribal nations. In contrast, handing states the authority to and discretion over Indian education funds from the Department of Education is, NIEA argues, a breach of the federal Indian trust responsibility.
Some of the most significant challenges facing Indian Country are social and economic disparities, which are aggravated by federal programs that have remained “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ December 2018 budgetary report, estimating billions of dollars in unmet need. Project 2025 appears to have no awareness of the billions of dollars in unmet federal funding and no sincere plans to address basic tribal nation disparities plaguing Indian Country. Project 2025 seemingly ignores well-documented policy shortfalls and recommendations to alleviate Indian Country’s billions of dollars in unmet needs and services entrusted to federal departments and agencies.
While Native students at BIE schools consistently fall behind Native students attending public schools, massive systemic issues like long-standing funding shortfalls and underinvestment are primarily to blame. From investments in curriculum and education materials, teacher salaries, and maintenance of deteriorating school facilities, tribal nations and educators are left with stretched federal dollars and years of deferred maintenance for repairing deteriorating school facilities.
If the answer to an equal and adequate education for Native students was less federal funding for BIE schools, then there would be no graduation disparities between BIE students and public school students, or private school students for that matter.
As hundreds of tribal leaders and educators listened to each other’s statements to BIE leadership, more and more echoed common concerns toward Trump’s EO. It felt like unity within a diverse consultation from hundreds of tribal backgrounds. Casey Velasquez, chairman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said, “We, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, welcome improvements in Indian education, but we will not see it being torn down.”
