By T.J. GILLES
For The Outpost

Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Education:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan receiving a blanket from members of the Northern Cheyenne tribe

LAME DEER – Here came the suits.

The fact that Sen. Jon Tester had brought some of the big guns to the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation to view and discuss housing and education issues could be seen by the number of suits on the scene – particularly the dark blue trademark of the half-dozen not-so Secret Service bodyguards on the perimeters of gatherings featuring two members of President Obama’s cabinet.
Heads of the departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Education met with Montana officials and tribal leaders last week to announce stimulus-program awards for housing and hear recommendations and concerns.

“Housing and education go hand in hand,” Chippewa-Cree education official Raymond Parker said in a meeting in Billings later that day. “If you’ve got 15 people living in a three-bedroom house, it’s hard to study and do homework.”

Gov. Brian Schweitzer told the group: “When you’ve got three, four generations living together in an 800-square-foot house, it’s hard.”
For his part, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan took the occasion to announce that more than $250 million in Recovery Act (stimulus) money would be distributed among Montana tribes.
At a meeting of tribal leaders at Montana State University Billings, Salish-Kootenai Chairman Joe McDonald said “3,000 students at seven (Montana) tribal colleges were left out of the stimulus package” and are receiving no money to upgrade infrastructure and provide jobs.
Asked what he learned that day at a talking circle in Lame Deer, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said: “I talked to individual students at Lame Deer and the kids said, ‘We’re not being challenged, not being held accountable.’”
Students – and only about half the number who entered Lame Deer High last fall still remain – asked that the bar be raised.
School officials also raised concerns that parental involvement needs significant improvement, citing examples of low attendance at the school’s parent meetings.
Mr. Duncan told a reporter that in many ways his brief visit to Lame Deer “reminds me of inner-city schools of 10 to 20 years ago” with its huge dropout rate and lack of accountability, even-handed discipline and adult involvement and commitment to education.
The secretary’s parents both are educators and his mother founded and operates an after-school center for inner-city youth. At Harvard University, Duncan took off a year to live and observe in inner-city Chicago before writing his senior thesis in sociology on problems, cultures and aspirations in that educational system. Legend has it that because of his background among inner-city kids of his own age, when basketball coaches interviewed him by phone, they assumed he was an African-American because of his speech mannerisms.
At the Billings meeting, Jonathan Windy Boy of Northern Montana’s Chippewa-Cree Tribe said that while President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education scheme did have weaknesses and was criticized for its reliance on standardized tests and punitive measures when results were unpleasant, it did provide some perspective by breaking down statistics into ethnic and economic brackets.  Since at least the 1960s, study after study has linked the culture of poverty with lowered educational achievements of family members.
About half of all Montana schools were identified as being in need of improvement, said Tracy Tatsey of the Blackfeet Nation, who suggested that test formats may have an urban or urbane bias.
Mr. Windy Boy noted, “The lowest scores are on Indian Reservations,” with border towns on another tier and smaller schools off reservations in the top echelons as far as the percentage of students meeting standards for their grade level in the critical areas of reading and mathematics.
Robin Bighorn of the Fort Peck (Assiniboine-Sioux) Tribes said that if this lifelong underachieving is to be combated, “We need to emphasize early childhood education – and early childhood education for parents” and other adults entrusted with the rearing of small children.
Gov. Schweitzer agreed: “If you can reach a child by the time they are 5 or 6 years old” and instill a value in and joy of education, their lives are off to a more positive start.
At a press conference, Mr. Donovan said: “Let me be clear. I did see some hopeful signs on the Northern Cheyenne,” notably a 35-unit housing project for the elderly.
Mr. Parker said that his tribal government in the Havre area is in the process of taking “surplus” government housing – 200 homes from the Malmstrom Air Force Base a hundred miles away at Great Falls. “But we’ve still got 600 people on the waiting list for housing.”