Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be the most honest man in Washington. In a fascinating piece in Politico, Duncan admits the federal government is terrible at running schools. And the education system provided on tribal lands for young Native American children is the purest example of federal education – at its worst.

“It’s just the epitome of broken,” Duncan acknowledges. “Just utterly bankrupt.”

The root of the problem is federal heavy-handedness. There were good intentions all along, but the federal government’s involvement was toxic.

As Politico notes, “In the wake of the Civil War, as the federal government forcibly uprooted Native American tribes across the continent, some progressive educators saw an opportunity to remake Indian children in their own image.”

At one of the first schools for Native American children, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, they were barred from speaking their native languages and even given new “American” names.

“When families balked at sending their children thousands of miles from home so that they could be taught to reject their own culture, Congress authorized the secretary of the interior, who was in charge of all matters relating to the tribes, to withhold food from any family that didn’t turn over their children,” Politico reports.

That’s not so different now; the federal government routinely warns schools that don’t adopt its program de jour (such as testing) that their federal dollars are at risk.

When the New Deal came along, Washington acknowledged its Native American schools were a failure, so they tried again. But they kept the original goal, which – according to a congressional committee – was to make “the Indian child a better American rather than to equip him to be a better Indian.”

Since then, there have been numerous efforts to reform the system. They’ve all failed to provide even the most basic of children’s educational needs.

“The inadequacy of the education is harder to see than the dilapidated buildings,” it adds. “But the problems are not unconnected. Good teachers don’t want to come to schools that are remote and rundown. And if they do come, they don’t stay for long.”

The Obama administration has made yet another attempt at reform.

“The proposed reforms have met with deep skepticism on many reservations, where people have seen waves of reform come and go,” Politico explains.

What’s unclear at this point is whether Duncan and other Obama administration officials know where the federal government went wrong.

It’s not in a lack of funding.

“Indeed, the 2001 GAO report found that per-pupil spending on (Bureau of Indian Education) primary and secondary day schools was 56 percent higher than average per-pupil spending on all U.S. public schools,” notes the Cato Institute.

Cato’s recommendation is that the federal government should get out of the business of running schools.

“A good step toward reform would be to further Indian self-determination by ending the federal operation of schools and converting all BIE funding to block grants,” it says.

That’s true for pretty much all school systems. As Duncan points out, the federal government isn’t a very good educator.