The Obama administration says a series of small grants it has awarded to Native American tribes will help spur improvements to the network of federally funded schools that serve tens of thousands of American Indian students.
The U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Education, announced last month that six tribes will each receive $200,000 in Sovereignty in Indian Education enhancement funds.
The awards are part of the administration’s push to improve the quality of schooling provided by the BIE, which includes some of the lowest-performing public schools in the country. Tribes receiving the funding are in Arizona, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
President Barack Obama unveiled his vision last summer for an improved BIE, a long-troubled agency that directly operates 57 schools for Native American students and oversees 126 others run under contract by tribes.
