Cutting Into Indians’ Education

The quality of education for American Indians will be eroded if President Reagan is successful in imposing a combination of cuts and budget freezes proposed for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Education’s special Indian programs. That is unwise and unjust, a clear example of the folly of trying to reduce deficits without making significant cuts in defense funds and without raising taxes.

Most serious among the cuts for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is elimination of the $25.6-million Johnson-O’Malley program. In recent years this has served two important purposes: It has provided funding for supplementary programs for Indian students, enriching their education with tutoring, field trips and Indian cultural studies. And it has created grass-roots advisory committees of Indians to plan the programs--a process that has helped develop leadership and provide a decision-making role for tribal groups.

More than 80% of the 215,000 Indian students in elementary and secondary schools are educated in public schools. The Johnson-O’Malley program was created in 1934 as a fiscal incentive to persuade those schools to accept children from the Indian reservations. There had been resistance both on ethnic grounds and because the reservations are not subject to local school taxes. Now the program is directed at curriculum enrichment for the Indians. Other funds compensate local school districts for the expenses. A freeze is proposed for those other funds for next year. They include $214 million in impact aid to compensate for the fact that the reservations do not pay school taxes, $23 million given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs by the Department of Education for remedial-education services, another $63 million under the general federal program for compensatory education for disadvantaged children, and $67 million under the Department of Education’s Indian Education Program--most of it given directly to local school districts with Indian students.

Almost 20% of the Indian children are still educated in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools on the reservation. Funding for that program will rise by about $6 million next year, to $190 million, under the President’s budget proposals. The overall budget for the bureau, however, will be cut from the current appropriation of $994 million to $927 million, according to the proposal.

The dilemma of budget-makers is evident under the present pressure to reduce the deficit. Each element of the budget has its own special-interest defenders. The goals and restrictions imposed by the President seem to make that an impossible job. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the task cannot justify a strategy for reducing deficits at the expense of the disadvantaged and marginalized people of the nation.