Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools: Expenditures in Selected Schools are Comparable to Similar Public Schools, But Data Are Insufficient to Judge Adequacy of Funding and Formulas

In 2001, Congress directed GAO to examine the adequacy of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school funding and the adequacy of the formulas employed by BIA to distribute various types of operating funds. Because there is no universally accepted standard for adequacy, for this report, GAO examined:

1. The sources and amounts of federal funding provided for BIA schools and how they are determined,
2. How BIA school budgets and expenditures compared to national per-pupil expenditures and expenditures for similarly situated public schools, and
3. How equitably various formulas distribute funding across BIA schools and whether they account for all relevant costs.
   To obtain expenditure data for BIA schools GAO reviewed BIA budget and financial documents and collected data from 8 BIA and 6 public schools that were similar in terms of their relative isolation and student characteristics.