Teacher Equity Plan | Bureau of Indian Education

Welcome to the Bureau of Indian Education's (BIE) webpage dedicated to keeping stakeholders and educators up-to-date on the development and implementation of the Educator Equity Plan. This page is a resource, which provides access to basic policy documents and records of listening sessions. Listening sessions are opportunities for the BIE to gather feedback from tribal leaders, tribal education leaders, educators, and others interested in improving academic and life outcomes for students served by the BIE.

The BIE seeks to ensure that each of our Native students is taught by excellent educators and served in schools with strong leaders. We know this is paramount to both the families of our students and the BIE. The BIE seeks to not only attract high-quality teachers and leaders, but to retain them, for the purpose of improving student achievement.

WHY IS THE BIE DEVELOPING AN EDUCATOR EQUITY PLAN?

On July 7, 2014, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a request, which called for each State Educational Agency to submit a plan describing the steps it will take to ensure that "poor and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers." The Department of Education (ED) calls the plan the Equitable Access to Excellent Educators or Educator Equity Plan. In response to the ask, the BIE is currently crafting an Educator Equity Plan, which outlines how it is ensuring all its students are taught by effective teachers. This plan is responsive to the urgent, unique and difficult-to-measure challenges faced by the students in BIE schools, and establishes a direction aligned with broader reforms underway (Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell?s June 13, 2014, Secretarial Order 3334, or the Blueprint for Reform). The final version will be submitted to ED for approval.

WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE EDUCATOR EQUITY PLAN?

The Equity Plan reflects careful study of existing data, and it includes input from a range of experts, stakeholders and practitioners. Existing data was utilized in order to define equity gap hypotheses. From there a team of leaders considered root causes of those gaps and proposed strategies to eliminate them. Key questions for consideration were brought to five stakeholder meetings. The feedback was carefully considered as revisions were made to the Plan. Once the Educator Equity Plan is approved, the BIE will begin implementing the strategies that were proposed, in order to close the identified equity gaps and improve student achievement. After year one of implementation, the BIE will report on the progress and will visit with stakeholders once again, with the purpose of improving the plan.