What Accurate Identification Means for Indigenous Students, and the Challenges of Doing So

Numerous federal and state programs provide funding for the education of K-12 Indigenous students, but many school districts are unaware of just how many students in their schools are Indigenous. A hodgepodge of varying methodologies of identifying who is American Indian/Alaska Native—and even to which Tribal Nations they belong—has resulted in an undercount of Indigenous students in public schools that, according to an AIR project, may be as high as 70 percent. This undercounting could affect how much funding schools could receive and the services they provide to Indigenous students. 

The first report from the Indigenous Student Identification Project, funded by the AIR Equity Initiative, examines the many counting approaches, explains how the data are collected and used, and assesses the quality of Indigenous student counts in the context of the federal trust responsibility for the education of Indigenous people. In this Q&A, Nara Nayar, a technical assistance consultant, explains why it’s important to accurately count Indigenous students and the challenges of doing so in practice.

Read the report and explore the various ways students are counted in this interactive map.  

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Q. What was the genesis of this project?

Nayar: Folks at the state level were concerned that there were more American Indian and Alaska Native students out there who weren’t receiving services because they weren’t being counted using the data collection method that the federal government has been using. This is a big issue for the Indigenous Education State Leaders’ Network (IESLN), a group of state education agency staff and contractors that is co-leading this project. Network members identified that counting methodology was an issue for their schools.

The Indigenous Student Identification Project supports the “Triple A” vision, which means Native student counts should be accurate, appropriate, and accountable to tribes. So for any given count, we want to know: Is it accurate? Are you getting the right number of students? Are you counting all of the students who meet the definition you’re using? Is it appropriate? Does the count meet the policy purpose for which it’s being used? And is the process or outcome accountable to tribes? Do tribes verify the numbers or have input on the programs that are using these counts?
 

Q. Why is it important that we identify students with Indigenous backgrounds?

Nayar: There are several reasons. There are funding streams connected to Indigenous students, especially those that fulfill the federal trust responsibilities. Additional federal funding streams, such as the Johnson O’Malley Act, are available from the Bureau of Indian Education for students who come from the 574 federally recognized tribes. Some states also have Indigenous education program funds. Minnesota, for example, has started collecting its race and ethnicity data differently to more accurately pinpoint students who are eligible for those funds.  

I think a lot of districts are unaware of their eligibility for funds, or their responsibilities under law to work with tribes. All districts where enrollment is 50 percent or more Native students are required to consult with local tribes about the education of their students. Inaccurate counts may mean that there are districts that should be doing this consultation and are not; some states notify affected districts, but many don’t. 

There are different counts for different purposes, but in the counting methodology used by the Department of Education, any student who is identified with more than one race disappears into a “two-or-more races” category in reporting. And that’s enough to take an already small population and render it statistically insignificant in many cases, which disproportionally affects Native students.
 

Q. What are some real-world, concrete outcomes from Indigenous students being undercounted? What occurs—or does not occur—in classrooms because of undercounts?

Nayar: For students to receive a culturally responsive and relevant education, they need to be seen as Native. They need to have been acknowledged. If the school doesn’t know how many Native students it has, how can educators make sure that they are integrating culture correctly in the classroom? That’s a big impact of accurate counts: teaching with the awareness that students in your classroom are coming from these different cultures. There’s plenty of research that shows that culture is a protective factor against a number of negative outcomes, as well as the ways in which it can enrich and increase the relevance of instruction.

The other big implication is that undercounts may lead districts to lose out on funding that they could use to support Indigenous students with culturally appropriate supplemental supports, like Indigenous afterschool programs, tutoring programs, and dropout prevention programs.
 

Q. Right now, many counts rely on self-identification. What are the inherent flaws in relying on students to self-identify?

Nayar: First, I should say, all counting methods have flaws. There are a lot of ways to be Indigenous—racially, politically, culturally, socially, and by descent. American Indian/Alaska Native is a racial category, but it’s also a political designation. In a lot of data analysis, the count for race and ethnicity is all that is available, so it gets used as a proxy for political designation. But only tribes themselves keep citizenship records. Folks can self-identify—you can, for example, say, “Yes, I’m Cherokee,” just to pull one example that gets inflated, but that doesn’t mean that you are a citizen of that nation unless the Cherokee Nation can verify your citizenship. Someone could be culturally affiliated with a tribe but not an official member or have a mother from one tribe and a father from another and only be enrolled in one of those tribes. So self-identification is not the same as tribal citizenship.
 

Q. What are the policy implications of this project?

Nayar: This project came along at the right moment. The White House Office of Management and Budget’s process of re-thinking their standards around how they collect and report race and ethnicity data coincided with its first year. The opportunity to coordinate around responding to the initial proposals was a welcome one, and the project has continued to engage with a number of organizations and individuals concerned about the guidance the Department of Education will adopt for future data collection and reporting.

Many states in IESLN are also actively pursuing the collection of tribal affiliation data, which is a whole different grain size of data collection that allows for greater disaggregation within the American Indian and Alaska Native category. And that’s a movement on a national scale, so we are part of that conversation, too. It’s been a very exciting time to be part of this work, because it’s really tapped into the gestalt and you can almost feel change happening.