The New Trail of Tears

by Naomi Schaefer Riley

  A typical critic of TFA is Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies at Fordham University, who explained in the Washington Post why he won’t let TFA recruit from his classes: “Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.”15

  Critics also claim that TFA corps members lack traditional certification from the states where they teach and are thus less able to manage underprivileged kids. But a quick walk through any inner-city public school would make you wonder exactly what education-school grads have been learning.

  Finally, critics believe TFA corps members are just too white. They don’t always put it that way, but for years they’ve accused TFA of having a “savior” mentality. In the fall of 2014, Teach for America responded directly to this criticism, boasting of the “most diverse” corps in its history, according to a press release, with 50 percent of its teachers identifying as people of color. “We’re proud that our incoming corps is more diverse than it’s ever been,” said Elisa Villanueva Beard, the group’s co-CEO. “We know that teachers from all backgrounds can have a meaningful impact on their students’ trajectories.”16

  But how meaningful is it? Jay Greene, who heads the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, notes that, when compared to other possible improvements, “The benefit [of having same-race teachers] is tiny.” Moreover, these gains are “zero sum,” meaning that students who aren’t the same race as the teacher don’t get the benefit. So are we supposed to segregate our classrooms to maximize this effect?

  Anyway, the real question isn’t how to improve the diversity of the teacher corps but how to improve teacher quality: we need more teachers who help their students perform well.

  The teachers Phelps hired at Wounded Knee to replace the TFA corps members were largely lured from other schools on the reservation by offers of about $10,000 more a year. Whether these teachers are more qualified than TFA corps members remains to be seen, but since there’s a massive teacher shortage on the reservation, it’s hard to imagine that this strategy will work in the long term. Even if every school were “turned around,” it would just be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

  Meanwhile TFA continues to fill the void. Robert Cook leads the Native Alliance Initiative for Teach for America. Cook’s parents both grew up on Pine Ridge, but he was raised in a small town outside of Rapid City. They were the only Indian family in town. He went to the local public school and then went to Brigham Young University to play baseball. His older sister joined the Mormon Church at the urging of local missionaries, and later Cook did too. After college, he came home and taught at a variety of local schools. He tells me he never had to have an interview “because there was never any competition for teaching jobs.”

  Cook, who has received numerous teaching awards, including a Milken Educator Award, joined TFA in 2010. He’s a gruff man and somewhat suspicious of the media. But he has a good handle on the educational problems plaguing Pine Ridge and other reservations. The biggest challenge “is human capital.” “How can you advance students in math and reading if you don’t have certified math and science teachers? How can you push students if you don’t offer advanced placement courses?” he asks. “Our students have every capability and every desire to do good, but if you don’t have the investment in the classroom with boots on the ground,” it amounts to nothing.

  How do you get qualified people to come to Pine Ridge? Every school on the reservation is scrambling for teachers. But the tribal school – Oglala Lakota College – doesn’t even offer a degree in secondary education. So you need to recruit from off the reservation.

  In addition to salaries being low (which is true for teachers in most rural areas), teachers have difficulty finding housing and even receiving health care. Most of the schools house their teachers in run-down trailers. It takes a particular kind of person to want to live here for two years, let alone do a longer stint as the critics of TFA are suggesting.

  To be blunt, teachers who come here have to really want to be here. But tribal leaders seem nevertheless intent on insulting their abilities and even their motives. Fire Thunder tells me, “They’re not adequately prepared. We have some enthusiastic ones, but they have a different mind-set.” She notes that many of them “are majoring in something else” besides education and that this is a problem. Yet research suggests that teachers who major in the subject matter they’ll be teaching are significantly more effective than those with education degrees. When I ask Fire Thunder about the teachers fired from Wounded Knee, she says dismissively, “I don’t think any of them were Native.”

  But truth be told, Fire Thunder is even skeptical of the Native teachers educated in universities off the reservation. “They are too white. They think Western. They have bought into the Western way of thinking lock, stock, and barrel. They look down on us. They don’t value their culture. They don’t understand anything about their culture.”

  Does that hold true for Kiva Sam, the woman who runs South Dakota recruitment for TFA? Fire Thunder doesn’t want to talk specifically about her.

  Sam’s grandparents raised her on Pine Ridge. Her grandmother, who had a degree from MIT in urban and rural planning, had worked on cleaning up the reservation after the Badlands were used as a bombing range during World War II. Her grandfather, who had attended Harvard, had a law degree and an education degree. He was a member of the Chocktaw tribe from Mississippi but helped rewrite the constitution here on Pine Ridge.

  Sam says she was “always considered the smart student” at Wounded Knee, and in retrospect, one of her principals said, they let her slip through the cracks. Her freshman year in high school, she got a scholarship to Proctor Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire. But like so many kids who leave this tight network of extended family on the reservation, Sam was homesick. She was also severely under-prepared – having no idea how to study for exams, she tells me. She left halfway through the year and returned to attend Bennett High School, a majority Indian school just off the reservation.

  But those few months away changed things for her. “It was very alienating. . . . A lot of my peers thought, ‘Oh, you’re acting like a white girl now.’ It made me feel very ostracized.” She had trouble figuring out where to fit in at Bennett, which had both white kids and Indian kids. “For a lot of non-Native students there were certain expectations, but for a lot of the Native students it was okay to sleep [in class]. It just didn’t seem like there was a lot of effort being put into ensuring that they were succeeding.” Sam was smart, but she was wary of being branded “white” again.

  She skipped a lot of her classes during that year but got As anyway. Then, in her sophomore year, she became pregnant. She decided to keep the baby, and her life seemed to take on a renewed sense of purpose. “I was going to school every day on time, getting my work done.” She took classes at Lakota College in addition to her high-school classes. Her mother offered to help care for her son, but Sam nevertheless had to start working to support him – 25 hours a week – in addition to going to school. She doesn’t mention the child’s father.

  Perhaps because of her family background, Sam planned all along to go to college. During the summer before her junior year of high school, she attended a program at Princeton University called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. LEDA helps underprivileged kids prepare for the college admissions process, offering them writing preparation, standardized test instruction, and leadership training. Sam applied to Dartmouth College and was admitted.

  But then what? She originally thought she would bring her son with her to school, but it quickly became clear, she said, that it wouldn’t be feasible. T
here were students who had children, but they were married and living in graduate student housing. There wasn’t a big single-mother population on campus. “There weren’t a lot of support systems in place to ensure that students who were nontraditional parents could succeed in that environment,” Sam tells me.

  And so Sam made the difficult decision to leave her son at home. While in school, she worked almost full-time to send money home for him. She bought his clothing, and, she tells me, “Sometimes I had to help my mom with the electricity bills and water bills.”

  Having decided to major in government, Sam was considering law school, but she wondered whether it was just because “that’s what my grandpa did and that’s what was expected of me.” After all her time away from home, she says, “I just felt like I needed to reconnect to my people and my community.” She talked to a Teach for America recruiter and decided to apply. Sam had been taught by someone from TFA during school and remained in contact with her over the years.

  Her teacher was a Chocktaw from Oklahoma, and Sam says she was very honest about her experience, which began in 2004. “Back then, there were no systems in place to help ensure that corps members of color were succeeding, corps members who shared the same backgrounds as their students.” She felt TFA “was representative of a dominant society of white kids.”

  Indeed, the notion that TFA was a bastion of white privilege was so pervasive that Sam almost decided to go serve in the Navajo Nation instead. “I wanted to work with Indian kids, but I didn’t want to feel out of place again.” She didn’t want people to think of her as the white girl again. Finally she decided, though, that she needed to be at home. She went to teach social studies at Little Wound High School. (I had arranged to visit Little Wound during my time at Pine Ridge, but a bomb threat closed the school for several days.)

  When I ask Sam whether she felt like an outsider at Little Wound because she was a part of TFA, she says most people didn’t know that she was with TFA. Once they found out, her colleagues were fairly accepting. But it’s telling that Sam didn’t advertise her TFA affiliation. “It’s a very divided community on this issue, I think, for good reason,” she says.

  As a recruiter for TFA, Sam says that she’s very careful not to recruit people with “that savior mentality . . . like ‘Oh, I’m going to help save these kids, these Indian children.” Instead, she says, she’s looking for someone “coming here because you want to provide something that they’re currently not getting.”

  When I ask her to clarify this point, she says, “I would want someone who is open, who is willing to feel uncomfortable, because you’re probably coming from an area where you’re the majority and now you’re going to be the minority.” It’s hard to imagine people applying to come to a reservation in South Dakota if they’re not willing to feel uncomfortable, but if Sam says such people exist, well, she should know.

  Joshua Menke teaches math at the Crazy Horse School in the town of Wanblee. Menke is actually in his fourth year here – his TFA stint ended two years ago. Born in South Dakota but raised in rural Minnesota, Menke had Native friends growing up and in college, but he’s not Native himself. Most of his experience in elementary school was in a multi-grade classroom, and he has given a lot of thought to the particular challenges of educating kids in a rural setting.

  Menke teaches 9th- through 12-grade math and has to do different preparation for each class for each day. The job definitely presents challenges. “There are not a lot of resources. It’s been 20 years since we had a high-school football team,” Menke says. But he seems used to it. “What’s cool is that this year my current seniors I’ve taught every year since they were freshmen.” Each year, he’s torn between trying to push ahead with the curricula they’re supposed to learn and building the basics that they never got in the early grades. The classes are small, and though Menke is not a commanding presence, he knows each student’s strengths and weaknesses, ensuring that they all pay attention and answer questions.

  Menke has thrown himself not only into his job but also into the community. He lives in a trailer near the school, and during the summers he participates in local sports leagues. “There is a softball league that happens in town and [there are] powwows all the time. When they see people here for the summer, they realize you’re not just here teaching or working. You’re inside the community.”

  A couple of years ago, nearby Badlands National Park was looking for people to help with their internship programs, and Menke applied. Last year, he directed the program and oversaw five students from Crazy Horse in an intern ranger program. “Some of it is learning to man the desk and interact with visitors, but they are also shadowing people doing paleontology.” They did field trips and hiking and camping and traveled to New York City as ambassadors for the program.

  When Sam says “I want people who are truly passionate about providing opportunities to students,” it’s hard to imagine anyone who fits the bill better than Menke. Despite his non-Native status, the community seems to have embraced him.

  Jim Curran, the executive director of TFA in South Dakota, says this story isn’t at all unusual. He acknowledges that the organization “is sometimes looked upon favorably and sometimes not.” But he suggests that those who are skeptical are often those least familiar with it. “If their kid actually has a Teach for America teacher – that’s probably the biggest changing point.” In August, there were 45 vacant teaching slots on Pine Ridge, and parents are happy to see that many of them have been filled by qualified instructors. In October during my visit, there are still at least 10 vacancies.

  Curran says he has received a kind welcome from the communities here. “I think what surprised me more was the fact that some people were willing to take me under their wing, invite this random white dude to a birthday party or a ceremony. I feel like I really got lucky.”

  Sam says that part of the challenge is having TFA corps members understand the goals of students and parents here. “At Teach for America, there is this push for college, college, college. And that’s important, but at the end of the day, some of our students want to do mechanics. It’s not a four-year degree, but it is higher education, and if a student wants to do that, then as teachers we need to ensure that we’re helping that student actualize his dreams.”

  Sam’s point is well taken, but it seems as though the issue here isn’t what kind of higher education kids will go on to but whether they’ll finish high school at all. Sam tells me that during her first year teaching, the average daily attendance was 60 percent. She would try calling the homes of kids who were regularly absent, but “school is the last thing on their minds. They’re not in that zone.”

  There are truancy laws on the reservation, but they go unenforced. “How are we assuring that we are accountable in all aspects?” Sam asks. There’s a limit to what educators can do, she says, because “our tribal government is one of the most dysfunctional tribal governments in the United States.” She also complains about the “deep family politics” involved in decisions at the school level.

  When she was teaching a couple of years ago, she had one student who wasn’t showing up to class or doing the work. She kept his mother in the loop, and when it came time for graduation, Sam told her, “He has not been here. I told you that.” A member of the student’s family was on the school board, and the principal told Sam to pass him anyway. “We had a very tense conversation. I told him, ‘If you want to pass him, you can, but I’m not going to. Because what you’re doing is what’s wrong with the reservations. We’re not teaching students that they have to show up to earn something, that they actually have to put the effort and the work in.’”

  Sam lost the battle. Her student, like so many others, graduated anyway. The effects of such actions, she says, are far-reaching. “If you look at Oglala Lakota College, most of their entering freshmen are working at below a 10th-grade level. They’re not prepared. But then in college they’re getting pushed through because it looks better to graduate mo
re students than to graduate students who are prepared.” And there’s no real check on such policies, because the students who graduate don’t then go on to compete for jobs in a real market. If they find employment, it’s with the tribal government or at one of these schools. And then the cycle repeats.

  Sadly, Sam says the situation has gotten worse. Because her own family was deeply involved in Indian politics in the ’60s and ’70s, she became familiar with the landscape. Of the American Indian Movement, she notes, some of the leaders didn’t have college degrees, but they deeply valued education, if for no other reason than they wanted to understand “the legal aspects of the U.S. pertaining to us.”

  Sam hastens to add that the fact that kids today are being raised by teenagers is not helping. Yes, she realizes that she was part of this epidemic, but during her first year of teaching at a school of 300, there were 17 pregnancies. The effects of this are staggering.

  And there’s only so much a school can do to combat these distractions. Parents have to take responsibility too. Curran believes that a big part of TFA’s role on the reservation is to encourage greater involvement in education. “A key challenge of education reform in Native communities is that the voices of parents, just the everyday parents, are very commonly left out of the solutions and the conversations that are happening in the state house or the Bureau of Indian Education.”

  Menke has found that “parents care a lot about their students’ education, but there is also a different relationship to the educational infrastructure in general.” Largely because of the boarding-school experience, “There is definitely some mistrust.” Sometimes that mistrust works to prevent students from going away to college as well. But Menke says that, more often than not, the kids feel an obligation to stay home. “A lot of students really are involved in their siblings’ lives.” In some cases, Menke has encouraged them to at least consider attending nearby Black Hills State University so they can be close to home but still continue their education.