Filling In Blanks Left by Freddie and Matt

It was a rare treat to see back-to-back great good education sense from a Marxist and a neoliberal.

I subscribe to Freddie DeBoer, and a friend gifted me a subscription to Matt Yglesias (not as Ed). Matt’s insufferable narcissist intern Milan kept me from subbing; after that tenure ended  I might have paid up–but then Matt blocked me on Twitter for mocking his NIMBY/YIMBY to socks analogy so oh, well.  I still read him and have been for lord, close to 25 years, even though his two pet issues would result in a billion immigrants living in cramped housing built against the will of the local communities now suffering from increased traffic and decreased quality of life.

Freddie’s so far left that I think my head would explode if I knew enough about Marxism to object, and I’m pretty sure he agrees with Matt on both YIMBYism and immigration, but I admire him tremendously for rebuilding his life after a terrible breakdown that happened all over social media.

Both are excellent on education. Strong recommend on Freddie’s book Cult of Smart and his essay Education Doesn’t Work but honestly, just search his substack for “education” and you’ll find all sorts of interesting work.

While Freddie has been consistent on education for a decade or more, Matt  used to be standard reformist Dem on education: anti unions, pro-charters (but a voucher skeptic)  teachers mostly suck, who cares if they quit, and so on. And he still writes nonsense occasionally that I rant about. But overall, he registered the “strange death of education reform” (parts one, two, three, four, and five) and appears to have adjusted his views towards realism. Yay.

(Not to brag or anything, but Freddie cites my work on the history of ed reform and Matt says I’m correct that parents, not teachers or policy, is why schools stayed closed.)

Anyway it was a real pleasure to see both writers within a week come up with articles stating truths that go unacknowledged by any writer less publicly reviled than Steve Sailer.

Matt states affirmatively that the US’s education system does a good job. Freddie argues that no one has a clear definition of success for the education system. Strong statements in a world where “education system” is universally preceded with the adjective “failed”. Naturally, both articles have been completely ignored by the mainstream media.

I wanted to do something to celebrate, but what should I do? Link them in and say wow, I totally agree?

It was their agreements that led me to a topic. Matt casually acknowledges Freddie’s main point, that we don’t have a clear vision of success. Both mention in passing that we spend a fortune on education.

So I thought I’d drill down.

Matt observes that education is subject to Baumol’s cost disease, that the increasing expense of teachers and other staff is a cause of the expense. Freddie just mentions the lousy cost benefit ratio from our spending.

Neither mentions two enormous factors in education spending. First up and best documented:  special education, enforced by IDEA, the federal law mandating states provide a free and appropriate education for all disabled students. When I wrote that article nine years ago, special education costs per student were roughly half again as much as general ed students. That’s almost certainly gone up since then. California, for example, spends almost three times as much on the average special education student. In 2018, New York spent 30% of its classroom instruction budget on special ed, another number that’s only certainly gotten worse. The federal government hasn’t come anywhere near its commitment to fund 40% of special ed expenses, and states vary on their spending depending on how aggressive parent lawsuits have been (the parents are almost always supported by the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court), finding a total national cost on special education is difficult, but everyone agrees it’s a lot.

The money is almost entirely wasted in terms of educational results. Special ed law originated before medical advances kept children alive in conditions we never anticipated. Imagine just one severely disabled child born at 25 weeks, blind, wheelchair bound, incontinent, and destined to life institutionalization. That child will need an expensive wheelchair, transportation, at least two paras, at a cost of what–$100K or more? Now multiply by what, 100,000 kids? Fewer? more? Now move up the disability chain to kids who can walk, can make it to the bathroom with an escort, but and can’t be put in a classroom without two full-time paras and they’ll disrupt the classroom every day. Or the kids who are locked in an autistic world, screaming if touched. There are still several steps up the chain until you get to the merely low cognitive ability students, the “mildly retarded” as they used to be called, the Downs Syndrome children that IDEA was originally intended to support.Then there’s the ADA which created educational and medical disabilities that allowed a huge pool of kids and their parents to make absurd demands that don’t actually do any good.

Special education mandates warring between the kids who need institutionalizing and the kids who could claim extreme risk from covid played a significant role in school decisions to open or close schools–mostly keeping them closed.

The other big cost bucket is immigrant education, a number even harder to pin down. Most analyses of these costs just say well, there’s X new kids and each kid costs Y. But  that ignores the history of ELL mandates, requiring districts to create ELL classes no matter how small for students dropped into our system with no English and often with very little formal education.

So then just count the expense of ELL students, right? No, because the majority of ELL students are American citizens, many of who have parents who foolishly checked “Yes” on the question about “is another language spoken at home” when registering their kids for kindergarten. Once a kid is flagged ELL, they have to test out and the test standard is pretty high. Many–and I mean well over 50%–of long term ELL kids are second or even third generation citizens who just aren’t very bright and whose  first language is English but whose parents or grandparents speak another language.

These students–again, a clear majority–are lumped in with the new arrivals. But the newbies come in a wild variety as well. Some of them–not many, but they exist–are students who attended school in their home country. Many even learned English and speak it fluently. Doesn’t matter. They’re put in ELL classes. ( I spent several months trying to get four kids from China, Vietnam, and Salvador with reading scores higher than our school’s average out of ELL classes and failed.) A larger number come as immigrant students as very young children and learn English organically. If they have reasonable IQs, they’ll test out early. A still larger number learns English but never have the intellect to test out. Still others show up in high school, often with very little formal education, with parents who frankly weren’t planning on putting them in school but rather putting them to work to pay off the coyotes.**

So how much do they cost? No one really knows and there’s very little interest in finding out for fear of pissing off a public already disenchanted with our immigration policy. If the ELL law sounds crazy, it’s essential to understand the law was written assuming we’d have only Spanish speaking ELL students–ironic, since the first ELL Supreme Court decision was about a Chinese American citizen. 

Even though ELL students are mostly citizens, the non-English speaking contingent coming from other countries cost a hell of a lot and they keep on coming, both legal and illegal. Thank Plyler vs Doe, denying states the right to refuse education to illegal immigrants–without it, I wonder if eventually states would have sought to deny education to legal immigrants as well.   Just as medical advancements and the ADA expanded the mandate of IDEA, so too did Plyler fail to anticipate the impact of  Hart-Celler and  Simpson-Mazzoli, to say nothing of the political class’s determination to increase legal immigration and refuse to police the border for decades. Recently, there have been more stories of the impact of immigrants on public schools, but this has been going on for decades, with all immigrants, not just the undocumented.

Most people simply don’t understand how huge these buckets of spending are because, well, it’s one of those areas where interest groups, the media,and politicians all have incentives to make it difficult to identify just how much money is spent.  Even once you find out, who wants to argue that we’re spending too much education money on newly arrived immigrants and kids who will live their lives in diapers?

But like both Freddie and Matt said:  We spend a lot of money and we don’t have a clear vision of success. I’m pretty sure they both were referring to “success” in terms of educable American students, ensuring opportunities regardless of economic status, helping students achieve to the best of their ability (or ignoring that ability, as our current law requires).

There lie the blank areas I’m trying to fill in.

Do most people count “success” as ensuring a student’s diaper gets changed twice a day? Do they count it as “success” when  violent students are pulled off teachers or paras before serious damage is done–or before the student shoots the teacher? Or how about we count a win when special ed resource teachers put out thirty boiler plate “individualized education plans” in a year? Or when a parent threatens to sue unless the district pays for private school for their child–and the Supreme Court backs them up? Are schools successful when they drag reluctant Afghan refugees through a few years of school without learning English or moving their skills beyond the third grade level, or when they keep kids who speak no English sitting mutely in elective courses because they can’t understand English enough to sit in academic courses and have no interest in learning?

Our education system spends billions on poorly defined mandates that don’t comport to achieving success as most Americans would (naively) define it.

American educational costs and objectives have ballooned out of control in ways that the public doesn’t understand, in no small part because the mandates originated at a time when the problems addressed were a tiny blip compared to the….Himalayan mountain ranges they represent today.

So three cheers to Freddie and Matt for giving our education system the credit it deserves. Hopefully one day the polity will demand control over the ballooning costs and responsibilities in areas that play at best a tangential role in what most consider education “success”.

Education Policy Proposal #4: Restrict K-12 to Citizens Only

I’ve been sketching out education policy proposals to contrast with the platitudes we usually see from reporters and wonks asking “questions” about “education platforms.” The policies I’m proposing would, alas, be too popular. So they can’t be mentioned.

Onto the fourth.

Last year, when President Obama’s amnesty decree flooded the school system with thousands of relocated students, the DoE and the DoJ issued a stern warning to force remind states to accept these students.

I have long been fascinated by Plyler vs. Doe, in which the Supreme Court held that states cannot deny school funding for educating illegal immigrants. I re-read it periodically to try and grasp its legal reasoning, as opposed to reacting purely as a citizen wondering what the hell the justices were thinking.

Plyler, in brief (sez a non-lawyer):

a) Illegal aliens are protected by the 14th Amendment.
b) Although aliens are not a suspect class and education is not a fundamental right, it’s an important one, so the state must provide a compelling interest for denying children education.
c) Undocumented status alone is not compelling interest.
d) Preserving limited resources for education of lawful residents is also not sufficiently compelling interest, as no evidence was presented that excluding illegal aliens would improve the state’s ability to provide high-quality education.

The Court emphasized their dismay that children were being punished for their parents’ choices. Moreover, the Texas law was enacted in part to discourage illegal immigration, and the Court pretty much decided that denying illegal minors education was a “ludicrously ineffectual” means of achieving this goal.

My reading of Plyler does not suggest that the justices placed an absolute ban on restricting access to a basic education, but rather that Texas had not made the case for it. The Court later denied a illegal minor access to schools based on parent residency (the child was living with his aunt), and of course not even Americans can go to any school they want to. So schools have maintained their right to restrict access, in some situations. Importantly, the Court continued to hold that education is not a fundamental right. In fact, to win a 5-4 majority in Plyler, Justice William Brennan had to keep Justic Lewis Powell on board and this point was a dealbreaker.

While the states have made efforts before to challenge this restriction, (notably California and Alabama), no one seems to have looked at Plyler as a map of what needs to be done.

Any law seeking to restrict access to American schools can avoid triggering Plyer, in my non-legal reading, by not singling out illegal minors or arguing such restrictions could reduce illegal immigration. To get around the Civil Rights Act, the law can’t discriminate by race, religion, or national origin.

So why not restrict public school to citizens?

Restrict Title I and IDEA funding to citizen students. Or, perhaps, withhold funding from all states that don’t restrict access to K-12 schools. Congress could also bring back the Gallegly Amendment with alterations to restrict immigrant access to public schools. Or a federal law could simply hold that no penalties would be imposed on states that restricted K-12 access to citizens.

Rationale: our citizens deserve our best effort and full resources in order to educate and develop our national potential. The expense and resources required to educate immigrants detract from our ability to educate our own citizenry.

The restriction would not discriminate against anyone based on race, income, or national origin. Any citizen born in Africa, Australia, Europe, South America, or Asia is welcome in our schools. Moreover, this law would not eliminate the compulsory education requirements. Immigrants would still have to educate their children in America. They just can’t use public schools.

It’s not as if legal immigrant children aren’t doing their bit to overburden our schools. According to the 2010 census, 2.6 million K-12 students were not born in this country, or about 1 in 20. Assume all but a few are not citizens. Does it matter if they are here legally when considering costs? They aren’t scattered evenly throughout the country. Asians and Hispanics in particular are heavily concentrated in districts and many of these students are not citizens, legal or not. So while only 5% of all students would be denied access, many districts would see substantial cost reductions in doing so.

Remember, too, that states foot the bill to educate all those refugees imported with federal blessings– Bosnians in San Francisco, Somalians in Portland, the Congolese and Bhutans in North Dakota, and the Syrians all over—and what they don’t cover, the federal government does through Title I. Immigrants can also take advantage of “choice” and create their own charter schools with public funds to self segregate.

Employers of skilled immigrants protest that they don’t impose costs, but that’s nonsense. Techies and professors tend to have kids with high test scores, but they still require teachers, classrooms, and services. Many tech-heavy regions have local schools that are from 40-80% Asian. These regions have much higher teacher salaries (and therefore pensions) because immigrants have driven up housing costs, too.

The usual arguments about immigration benefiting the local economy—whether true or not, once externalities are factored in—are irrelevant here, because school expenses are no longer local or even limited to the states.

Taxpayers foot the bill for all those education extras for immigrants, too. Like bilingual education, thanks to the Supreme Court and Lau v. Nichols, which requires that the states provide education in a student’s native language . About half of all ELL students are foreign born, so we could at least cut those costs in half. (Yes, most ELL students are born here. Worse than that, really. A good chunk of them had parents that were born here. In fact, over 50% of high school ELL students are second or third generation.)

Then all the IDEA special education services described earlier are granted to immigrant students as well. Schools have to assume the full costs of “educating” a child with traumatic brain injury, blindness, or executive function processing issues no matter where he was born.

All those immigrants are then lumped into the melting pot of data that the feds and education reformers of all stripes use to beat schools up for the misfortune of having students with low skills and spotty attendance. School services are expected to support students with multiple issues in multiple languages, yet somehow it’s a shock that schools have more employees who don’t teach.

The advantages of this approach go way beyond just reduced education costs and tremendous popularity for the politicians who support it. Corporations and academic institutions would be forced to limit hires to childless immigrants or compensate for private schools as part of immigrant employment. Citizens would be in a better position to compete for jobs. Similarly, refugee organizations would no longer be able to dump traumatized children on an unsuspecting school district; bringing in refugees would require they fund education costs at private school rates. Chain migration efforts would be stymied; bringing family members over is a much more costly endeavor if education costs aren’t covered.

As for illegal immigrants, they’d be more likely to leave their kids back home, being unable to afford private school.

But although this restriction has tremendous potential to reduce immigration, that must not be the point of the legislation, if we follow the Court’s strictures. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg could show their support for immigration by ending their “philanthropy” for public schools and fund scholarships for illegal immigrant children to attend private schools.

Assuming that tech companies and universities keep hiring skilled immigrants, the private education market would expand tremendously to provide services. The same public schools that pay millions to educate immigrants with public funds would be laying off teachers by the dozens, if not hundreds, once the requirement was lifted, so the private schools could pick up staff cheap.

Yes, immigrants pay taxes. But taxpayers, immigrant or no, don’t always qualify for the services they pay for. Immigrants get considerable benefits from coming to America. They can decide whether or not the benefits are worth the price they pay.

Recently, a Twitter follower tried to gently remonstrate with me when I mourned John Kasich’s loyalty oath to the GOP powers that be, the promise that he’s Jeb in all things immigration.

Immigrants are people too, kiddo.

Because the only reason that anyone could possibly have for wanting to limit immigration is a total absence of contact with the people themselves.

In our national immigration conversation, no one seems to get beyond “immigrants are a threat to America” or “immigrants are hardworking salt of the earth”. Rarely in this debate do you hear the voices of people who routinely work and live with immigrants enough to know that immigrants are both, and neither, and everything in between.

As a teacher, I interact daily and meaningfully with kids of every race from every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Legal and illegal. Educated and uneducated. Rich and poor. Brilliant, average, and slow. I’m not serving them dinner, making their lattes, helping them negotiate food stamps, handling their visas, or any other one and done service. Nor am I an expert deeply clued in to one particular immigrant community, be it Hispanic, Hmong, or Haitian.

I form sustained working relationships with all the variety, all the time, all at once: Nigerian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Dominican Republic, ethnic Chinese, actual Chinese, Korean, Indian, Bengalese, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Fijian, Nepalese, Afghan, Iranian, Russian, Syrian…the list goes on. I teach them math, talk about the day’s events, get them to listen to me, yell at them when they don’t. I try to figure out how to engage them, help them learn what they care little about. I talk about movies, music, values, politics. I deal with their parents, codeswitching to comprehend different educational value systems with each conversation.

I very much doubt that anyone in the country has more exposure to the reality of immigration in all its many forms—although many others can tie. Most of those others are teachers. None of those others are in public office, much less running for president.

Only those people are as aware as I am that immigrants are people, too.

My students have my love and dedication regardless of their birthplace. I want the best for all of them.

And that’s why our free education should be reserved for citizens.

Every time Congress, the courts, or the voters institute another educational requirement, they are constraining resources, demanding tradeoffs. At the micro level, as a teacher who wants the best for all my students, every minute I spend with an immigrant is a minute I can’t spend with a citizen.

Move from the micro-level on up.

Every textbook purchased, every IEP negotiated, every special ed kid on a dedicated special ed school bus, every free meal provided, every language published in….every service that goes to an immigrant, resources are taken away from citizen students.

Every teacher hired to reduce class size, teach support classes, offer advanced classes, every school resource officer hired to maintain order in high poverty schools, every truant officer hired to keep tabs on absentee students, every school clerk tasked with ensuring federal compliance ….and every pension paid to same…all that money spent on immigrant students removes possibilities for citizens.

It’s very close to zero sum. Everything we spend to service immigrant students in our educationial system is money we can’t spend on citizen students. Not just educational resources for those endless math and reading standardized tests, but custodial resources for clean bathrooms and trash-free campuses, more computer labs, later library hours, better gyms, more auditoriums, fewer participation fees, longer air conditioning, and a whole host of amenities that have dropped off the list of services our schools used to provide for free.

Is it too much to ask that we devote our resources to our own? I ask this particularly for our American students living in poverty. Bad enough, in my view, they compete for jobs and college access with immigrants that our country welcomes, officially or no, without thought to their impact on the economy and labor pool. But even as schoolchildren, our citizens, no matter how needy, are forced to stand in line for time and resources behind those whose parents came here for a job or a safe place to live and have already received tremendous benefits just by being allowed to live here—legally or not.

A larger debate can, of course, be had about school spending. But in demanding so much from our schools, why are they required to take on such enormous responsibilities and expenditures for other countries’ children?

What does America owe its own children?

Next, and last, of the policy proposals: End the English Language Learner Mandates