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

Education: No Iron Triangle

I came from the corporate world, which invented the project management triangle. (“Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick Two.”)

Education has no triangle.

Money, of course, doesn’t work. Just ask Kansas City. Or Roland Fryer, who learned that kids would read more books for money but couldn’t seem to produce higher test scores for cash. Increased teacher salaries, merit pay, reduced class size are all suggestions that either don’t have any impact or have a limited impact….sometimes. Maybe. But not in any linear, scalable pattern.

“Good”? Don’t make me laugh. We don’t have a consensus on what it means. Most education reformers use the word “quality” exclusively to mean higher test scores. Teachers do not. Nor do parents, as Rahm Emanuel, Cami Anderson, Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee have learned. Common Core supporters have had similar moments of revelation.

So until we agree on what “good” is, what a “high quality education” means, we can’t even pretend that quality is a vertex of education’s triangle, even if it existed. We could save a whole lot of wasted dollars if people could just grasp that fact.

Time is an odd one. We never use the word directly, but clearly, politicians, many parents, and education reformers of all stripes believe we can educate “faster”. Until sixty years ago, calculus was an upper level college course. Once the high school movement began, fewer than 3% of students nationwide took trigonometry, between 10-20% took geometry, and the high point for algebra was 57%–over one hundred years ago–then declining to 25%. (Cite.) One of the little noted achievements of the New Math movement was to alter the math curriculum and make high school calculus a possibility. At first, just kids with interest and ability took that path. Then someone noticed that success in algebra I predicted college readiness and everyone got all cargo cult about it. By the turn of the century, if not earlier, more of our kids were taking advanced math in high school than at any point in our history.

And that was before kids started taking algebra in seventh grade. Sophomores take now take honors pre-calculus so they can get a second year of AP calculus in before graduation. Common Core has gone further and pushed algebra 2 down into algebra I.

Yet 17 year old NAEP scores have been basically stagnant for the same amount of time our high school students have been first encouraged, then required, to take three or more years of advanced math.

Not only do we try to educate kids faster, we measure their gain or loss by time. Poor kids of uneducated parents lose two months learning over the summer. CREDO, source of all those charter studies, refers to additional days of learning. Everyone comparing our results to Singapore always mentions the calendar, how much earlier their kids start working with advanced math. These same people also point out that Singapore has a longer school year. Longer school years don’t appear to work reliably either.

Except maybe KIPP, whose success is mostly likely due to extended school hours. KIPP focuses on middle school and has not really been scrutinized at the high school level. Scrutiny would reveal that the program doesn’t turn out stellar candidates, and while more KIPP alumni complete college than the average low income black or Hispanic student, the numbers are reasonable but not extraordinary when compared against motivated students in the same category who attended traditional schools. Particularly given the additional support and instruction hours the KIPP kids get.

So KIPP’s “success” actually adds weight to the NAEP scores as evidence that time–like money and quality–doesn’t respond to the project management constraints.

Kids learn what they have the capacity to learn. Spending more instruction hours will–well, may–help kids learn more of what they are capable of learning in fewer school years. But the NAEP scores and all sorts of other evidence says that learning more early doesn’t lead to increased capacity later. And so, we’ve moved 1979 first grader readiness rules to preschool with considerable success, but that success hasn’t given us any traction in increasing college readiness at the other end of childhood. Quite the contrary.

I probably don’t have much of a point. I was actually thinking about the increasing graduation rates. It’ll be a while until part 2. I’m swamped at work, moving again, writing some longer pieces, and really would like to post some math curriculum rather than detangle my mullings.

But the triangle thing is important. Really.

Take note: under 1000 words. Hey, I have to do it every year or so.