Tag: Undocumented Immigrants

Doing Right for All Children at All Times

February 12, 2018 3:13 pm February 12, 2018

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Your editor could spend the day tearing apart the latest claptrap about the apparent “failure” of D.C. Public Schools from Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage…

Your editor could spend the day tearing apart the latest claptrap about the apparent “failure” of D.C. Public Schools from Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation. As you would expect, it is a shoddy piece co-written by a ‘wonk‘ whose ‘research‘ on so many issues is slipshod at best. But there are far greater concerns that must be addressed this week — and school reformers must do more than be studiously silent about them.

There’s the upcoming debate happening on the floor of the U.S. Senate over whether the undocumented immigrant youth who are under the threat of deportation thanks to the Trump Administration’s decision last September to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (as well as its low-grade ethnic cleansing effort against Black and Brown communities). Not only are those children’s lives are stake, so are the futures of native-born children of undocumented emigres being deported by the Trump regime.

With 100 or so Dreamers losing their DACA status each day, and more than 780,000 children and adults (including 9,000 teachers in classrooms) under the threat of being thrown out of the communities they have called home nearly all of their lives, ensuring that Congressional leaders do the right thing by them is as important to ensuring brighter futures for them as addressing the quality of teaching and curricula.

But keeping the Dreamers in schools is also important on educational grounds. As a team led by Kevin Shih of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute determined in a study released today, DACA’s protections contributed to an 11 percentage point increase in graduation rates among undocumented Latino emigres, leading to 49,000 more high school graduates. These benefits, along with increases in college attendance, accrue to the youth as well as their communities, and ultimately, to the nation itself.

There’s also the continuing evidence that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will do nothing to protect the civil rights of our most-vulnerable children. The latest example came today when the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would no longer accept complaints filed by transgender children over policies that ban them from using restrooms fitting with their gender preferences.

Given that the Trump Administration has already repealed an executive order requiring such accommodations as recognized under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the move was not a surprise. But it is still an outrage. Not only is DeVos supporting active discrimination against vulnerable youth, she is abdicating the federal government’s obligation to protect them from harm. Which is as damaging to these children — if not more so because of their increased risk of physical harm — as forcing them to attend failure mills.

As with protecting Dreamers, helping transgender youth is also an educational concern in extraordinarily concrete ways. Some 41.8 percent of transgender high schoolers reported being subjected to out-of-school suspensions and other forms of harsh traditional school discipline, according to a 2016 survey by GLSEN. When the Department of Education holds school operators to account for overusing harsh discipline against all children, they are helping our youth gain the school cultures they need to thrive beyond classrooms.

These are two of the most-immediate issues outside of the usual education policy and practice matters that should concern reformers as well as all champions for children. But they aren’t the only ones.

Supporting the efforts of criminal justice reformers and Black Lives Matter activists in addressing police brutality and corruption that touches the lives of our children remains important. Especially given the outsized role American public education plays in perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline (especially as the second-highest source of referrals to juvenile justice systems).

The disenfranchisement of Black and Latino voters (as well as other communities) through gerrymandering and vote suppression tactics are also important matters on which the movement should weigh. Why? Because most of the nation’s 14,000 or so traditional districts are still run by elected boards who should be accountable to the families they serve, while chief state school officers are elected in 13 states. This, by the way, is an election year.

Certainly school reformers have to devote much of their time to addressing policy and practice. But there is no reason why reform outfits aren’t signing on to letters from immigration rights activists in support of DACA youth, or issuing statements calling out DeVos for refusing to meet the federal government’s civil rights obligations to children, or working with voting rights activists on registration drives.

These moves are the right things to do on behalf of our children. They are also politically sensible. As your editor has stated over and over again, and it has been proven by both reformers such as Green Dot founder Steve Barr, sustaining systemic reform means gaining support from poor, minority and immigrant communities. Reformers can’t win support for their long-term agenda from those men and women if they aren’t willing to stand alongside them on the immediate concerns facing their neighborhoods. You can’t gain allies if you’re not willing to be one — and no one cares about your ideas until you show that you care about them.

Yet while some in the movement (especially civil rights-oriented reformers, as well as Teach For America and the Education Trust) have stepped up, many others have exhibited almost no concern.

Charter school lobbyists are fretting about whether the Trump Administration will provide help to charter school operators in its possible $1 trillion infrastructure plan — even though most expect that the regime’s plan will mostly be funded by states and local governments from which charters can already lobby for more money.

Conservative reformers are more-interested in arguing that the graduation scandal at D.C. Public Schools proves that overhauling traditional districts is not worth doing — despite the fact that a close look at the objective evidence proves such arguments to be ill-considered, lacking in nuance, and have no regard for actual facts.

Hardcore school choice advocates are complaining (as they always do this time of year) about the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ latest ranking of charter school authorizing laws. They have some legitimate concerns. But they won’t matter if children are being deported and cannot attend schools in the first place.

Other reformers will wag their tongues about the Trump Administration’s all-but-dead-on-arrival budget for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. As with last year’s proposal, it will push for a pilot program to voucherize $500 million in Title 1 dollars (will never happen) and increase federal charter school funding by 47 percent (also unlikely), while proposing the elimination of other programs such as TRIO, which has helped generations of poor and minority children attend and complete higher education.

Not one of these things have to do with the immediate pressing need to protect all children, especially those Black and Brown as well as immigrant and transgender, from the Trump Administration’s predations against them. Not at all. Even worse, in their failure to speak out constantly and zealously against the damage this administration does against our children and their families, reformers become the kind of “friends” that Martin Luther King warned against six decades ago. The silence of the movement will rightfully be remembered without kindness or charity — and, as seen in the past couple of years, will be repaid at a high cost, both to the movement, and ultimately, to the children for which reformers proclaim so much concern.

The time for silence has long passed. It is time to stand up and be counted.

Photo courtesy of Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

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Three Thoughts

529 Vain Hopes to Expand School Choice

November 3, 2017 12:01 am November 3, 2017

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Dropout Nation normally doesn’t publish on Fridays. But yesterday’s unveiling by Congressional Republicans of $1 trillion tax-cutting proposal includes a plan to expand school choice through existing education savings plan…

Dropout Nation normally doesn’t publish on Fridays. But yesterday’s unveiling by Congressional Republicans of $1 trillion tax-cutting proposal includes a plan to expand school choice through existing education savings plan currently used to fund higher education tuition payments. The actual mechanics — as well as a failure to provide a similar tax credit plan to low-income families — is another reminder that the Trump Administration has no good intentions for poor and minority children. It is also proves that hopes among conservative reformers for a major expansion of choice weren’t worth the compromises they made to their morality and commitment to help all children.

At the heart of the Congressional Republican plan, contained in House Resolution 1 (or the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”), is a move to allow families to use 529 college savings plans offered by states and some financial firms to pay as much as $10,000 a year in elementary and secondary school expenses. This can range from private school and apprenticeship tuition to expenses for tutoring services families use to help their children succeed in school. If implemented, the idea, floated earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation, would transform 529s from mere college tuition savings programs (and tools for grandparents to siphon off their wealth before going into the hereafter) to vehicles similar to education tax credits already in place in states such as Nevada.

For middle class and wealthier families who haven’t used 529s so far, not only would the conversion of the plans help them pay for private school tuitions and other expenses, it also comes with a tax benefit to boot. Nearly every state allows contributors to 529 plans to exercise a tax deduction, meaning more tax dollars back into their pockets. Which, by the way, is something they will need since Congressional Republicans plan on reducing the level of deductions they can take on state and local taxes in order to finance the tax cuts they plan under the bill.

Save for worries about 529 plans straying from the original purpose of saving for those increasingly expensive college bills (and the risk of reducing incentives to seek out college education), your editor has no great problem with this proposal on its face. After all, middle class families in suburbia (especially those from Black and Latino households) have long been denied the charter schools and other choice options that are far more robust in urban communities. If this plan was tied together with an Earned Income Tax Credit-style program that helps poor and minority households gain money they can use for private school tuition payments and tutoring (which they can then use to make direct payments or start 529 accounts for their children), as well as keeping current deductions on state and local taxes (which help fund traditional districts), the proposed 529 conversion would be a win-win for all families and children.

Yet this is not the case. Neither Congressional Republicans nor the Trump Administration pushed for an education tax credit program. Which means poor and minority households end up losing out on additional opportunities to help their children gain opportunities for high-quality education and ultimately, the knowledge they need to become part of the middle class.

The lack of such a plan raises the same concerns school choice advocates such as Howard Fuller have had about ESAs that poor families lose out at the expense of families that already have resources and can take advantage of various vehicles that allow them to save and reduce tax burdens all at once. This is especially problematic when you consider that 51 percent of all K-12 students (especially those from Black, Latino American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian households) are on free- and reduced-lunch programs, a proxy for being low-income. The American Federation for Children (whose board current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos once chaired) has already expressed disappointment that nothing was done to help the poorest families gain choice.

Your editor isn’t exactly shocked. As Dropout Nation readers can recall, I noted back in July that efforts to use the tax code to expand school choice were running afoul of Congressional tax writers, whose concerns had more to do with reducing tax bills for higher-income Americans and corporations than with expanding choice. [Staffers at the U.S. Department of the Treasury also disdained those plans because of the potential impact on the nation’s finances.]

That the Trump Administration is a basket case of a regime with few appointments filled at the U.S. Department of Education and incapable of convincing senators to pass various versions of an ObamaCare repeal all but guaranteed that a school choice expansion would be lackluster. Add in the reality that Congressional and Senate Republicans are also terrible in crafting legislation, and the likelihood of a comprehensive choice program was remote to impossible.

But the problem wasn’t just with the Trump regime’s inability to organize and craft policy (or that of Congressional Republicans). The administration has demonstrated since January that it has no interest in doing well by poor and minority children.

Even the one bone it tossed — a $250 million increase in funding for the federal Charter School Fund and the devotion of $1 billion in Title I funds for intra-district choice for low-income children — was funded in part by eliminating $2.2 billion in funding for Americorps, the program that helps districts provide poor and minority children with Teach for America recruits proven to improve their academic achievement. Given Teach For America’s political muscle as well as that of traditional districts, and those reductions were never going to happen. The effort, put simply, was anything but serious policymaking for advancing systemic reform.

Meanwhile the Trump Administration has done all it can to render miserable the lives of Black, Latino, Native, and immigrant children. From ending Obama Administration-era efforts to stem overuse of harsh school discipline against minority children, to September’s move to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (which ensured that 760,000 undocumented immigrant children, youth and adults brought to the country as children aren’t deported), to last week’s move to detain 10-year-old Rosa Maria Hernandez as she was heading to a Laredo, Texas, hospital for emergency surgery, the Trump regime has proven uninterested in doing right by our most-vulnerable children.

Conservative reformers, including hardcore school choice activists, will argue that at least there may be an expansion of options through converting 529 plans. But that may not happen. This is because the tax plan itself is now opposed by a variety of interests, including homebuilders and real estate agents opposed to the proposed limitation of the mortgage deduction to homes worth less than $500,000, states and districts upset over the limits on state and local tax deductions, deficit hawks worried that the plan will increase the federal deficit, healthcare advocates concerned that the plan will be a stealth attempt at repealing ObamaCare, and advocates for abortion opposed to the 529 proposal’s plan to allow for families to save for the unborn. So it is unlikely to pass. Which means that this plan to expand choice may not happen after all.

Since DeVos’ nomination last November, all but a few conservative reformers have been silent about both the Trump Administration’s bigotry (as well as DeVos’ own lack of fitness for the job), while others have actively defended it. All in the hopes that their policy proposals would become reality. But it increasingly appears that for the most part, those hopes have been dashed.

These folks will have to look themselves in the mirror and ask if any of this was worth sacrificing their mission to help all children, no matter who they are or where they live, succeed in school and in life. The answers should trouble them their sleep and their waking hours.

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Three Thoughts

Protect Our Immigrant Children

August 30, 2017 12:01 am August 30, 2017

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As you already know, the Trump Administration has declared open war on undocumented immigrant children and their families, as well as the 5.9 million native-born children of emigres to this…

As you already know, the Trump Administration has declared open war on undocumented immigrant children and their families, as well as the 5.9 million native-born children of emigres to this country who fled economic despair, political oppression and violent crime. For the school reform movement, it is another reminder of why we must fight harder to oppose what the regime is doing (and plans to do) to our most-vulnerable children and their families.

President Donald Trump made clear his bigotry toward Latino children (as well as his contempt for the rule of law) last Friday night when when he pardoned former Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The disgraced law enforcement official, whose long list of misdeeds includes failing to investigate alleged sexual assaults of undocumented emigres (including the molestation of 32 children), was convicted this month of contempt of court for violating a federal court order to stop discriminatory profiling of Latinos (including those native-born and undocumented who had no criminal record) to ascertain their citizenship status.

By pardoning Arpaio, Trump gives rogue cops and police departments the carte blanche to engage in criminal abuse of immigrants as well as blessed all kinds of police brutality and other violations of civil liberties of all Americans. Given the wide criticism he received over the last two weeks for failing to condemn White Supremacists who committed murder and mayhem earlier this month in Charlottesville, Va., the pardon is also a clear sign of where his administration stands when it comes to the federal role of protecting the civil rights of poor and minority communities.

Arpaio’s pardon comes on the heels of new reports that the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents are engaging in all kinds of roguery.

Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed in a lawsuit on behalf of three undocumented immigrant youth that the federal agency is teaming up with police departments (including the 250 law enforcement agencies operated by traditional district schools) to pick up, detain, and ultimately, deport unaccompanied refugee children and other undocumented minors. The children, already vetted by other federal agencies, are supposed to be turned over to their parents or to the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead, ICE is violating federal law by placing them in detention centers halfway across the country from where they live, putting them in danger of being molested and assaulted.

In the particular case being represented by the ACLU, ICE teamed up with Suffolk County, N.Y., police officers to pick up three unaccompanied refugees from Honduras and El Salvador attending high school in New York’s Brentwood district for allegedly being members of the MS-13 gang. ICE agents and Suffolk County cops have proclaimed in court that the children admitted gang affiliation even though they have been unable to provide any physical evidence or corroboration.The Brentwood district allegedly conspired with ICE and Suffolk County cops by suspending students who were suspiciously picked up for deportation days later.

Through ICE, the Trump Administration has attempted to pry data from districts in order to conduct their operations as well as standing outside schools so they can pick up kids and parents entering schoolhouse doors. Such data is prohibited from being disclosed to ICE by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the law governing the release of school data, but district staffers aren’t always aware of this. As a result of the tactics, traditional districts are issuing guidance to school leaders and others to not release any data.

Meanwhile the Trump Administration has taken particular aim at “border children” from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala who fled to this country to escape violence. Two weeks ago, Homeland Security canceled the Central American Minors Parole, which allowed 3,000 such kids to remain in the country. This will likely lead to those kids, some as young as 11, to be deported, and shortchanging them of schooling they need and deserve. The move by ICE this month to deport Lizandro Claros-Saravia, who was set to attend Louisberg College on a partial athletic scholarship, shows that collegians who are destined to contribute greatly to America’s economy and society, will also be shown the door.

Things will likely get worse for immigrant children will likely in the next few months if the Trump Administration moves to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the initiative started under the Obama Administration to exempt emigres brought to the country as children from deportation. Some 760,000 children and young adults ages nine and older are protected under DACA. This includes 100 Teach for America recruits who are working in the nation’s traditional public and public charter schools.

If Trump goes ahead and ends DACA, as many expect, children in elementary, secondary, and schools of higher education will be tossed out of the country when they should be learning and ultimately becoming the nation’s future leaders and builders of its economy. It also means that teachers who are improving the quality of education for poor and minority children will also end up being deported, harming the futures of the children they serve.

As it is, the Trump Administration has already begun targeting DACA emigres for deportation. This has resulted in even more allegations of roguery by ICE agents. In the case of Riccy Enriquez Perdom, who was briefly detained last week and then released after public outcry, ICE agents allegedly told her that her DACA status had expired even though it had been renewed seven months ago.

The consequences for children of undocumented emigres and those kids who are undocumented themselves can already be seen in our schools. As the New Yorker detailed back in March, children are skipping school out of fear that their parents and themselves may end up detained and deported, or, in the case of native-born children, end up in the nation’s child welfare systems. Those kids whose parents are rounded for deportation suffer dramatically; on average, the household of those children, whose parents were working, paying taxes, and contributing to communities, declined by 50 percent, according to a 2014 study by Robert Warren and Donald Kerwin of the Center for Migration Studies.

It is almost impossible for children to learn and gain the knowledge they need for brighter futures if they are in conditions of instability and poverty caused by government action.

That many undocumented immigrant children (along with their families) came to this country to find safety, political oppression and economic stability makes the efforts of Trump Administration to get rid of them even crueler than it first appears. Given that they are undocumented because of the nation’s broken immigration system (whose quotas are a legacy of the racial bigotry against earlier generations of Latinos, Jews, Irish and Chinese emigres), and that most have never committed a felony, the administration’s effort is arbitrary, capricious, and unconscionable.

But the problem for undocumented immigrant youth extends beyond losing out on teaching and learning. Once picked up for deportation, a child is ensnared in an overwhelmed immigration court system that offers them no opportunities for due process.

The end of the day at Albertville Middle School. Statistics say the student body is 30% latino, but teachers think its higher. Many students were taken out of school when Alabama’s immigration laws were passed.

Judges aren’t required to give an undocumented immigrant child a lawyer who help them obtain a fair trial; 34 percent of the 56,663 children in immigration court in the 2013-2014 fiscal year had no lawyer representing them. When kids aren’t represented by lawyers, they are more-likely to be deported or placed in detention than those who aren’t; 68 percent of undocumented immigrant children without lawyers were ordered out of the country in 2013-2014, compared to just 6.1 percent of those with lawyers.

Even worse is what can happen to those children if they detained end up in detention centers (prisons and jails) in which sexual and other forms of criminal abuse is rampant. The likelihood of those abuses being addressed or even being reported is abysmally low. Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General investigated a mere 570 of the 33,126 allegations of abuse lodged by undocumented emigres in detention centers between 2010 and 2016, according to Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement. Given that ICE is now looking to destroy documentation of such complaints, the likelihood of even more abuse is greater than ever.

This discrimination against undocumented immigrant children and native-born progeny of undocumented Americans (as well as against their families) is that it is based on an intellectually indefensible and absolutely immoral premise: That immigrants are a scourge to the nation. This thinking, almost as old as the racialism that is America’s Original Sin (and has often intertwined with racism to detrimental effect on generations of poor and minority children), continues to be embraced by the Trump Administration, many Congressional Republican leaders, and their supporters despite the overwhelming evidence that immigrants contribute greatly to this country’s economy and society. [The fact that Trump, along with nearly all of his staffers, are the descendants of emigres of the last two centuries, makes their nativism hypocritical.]

The good news is that some reformers have already stepped out to demand that the Trump Administration keep DACA in place. This includes Chiefs for Change, which issued a public call today asking for retain protections for undocumented immigrant children, as well as former U.S. Secretary of Education John King (who called out the administration in a speech last week to a group of school leaders. But reformers can do more.

One step lies in working with districts and school operators to help them give sanctuary to the undocumented. Districts such as Chicago have already taken these steps, refusing to cooperate with ICE and other law enforcement agencies in their deportation efforts. But those districts need help. The movement can reach out to immigration reform groups and others to develop ways to help those families evade deportation; this includes running bus services that can transport children from homes to schools without endangering their families, as well as work with community groups such as San Francisco’s Arriba Juntos to provide schooling to those in fear of appearing in schools.

Reformers can also offer their experience on the school data front to help immigration reform activists hold ICE and the federal government responsible. This includes advocating alongside immigration reform activists to oppose destruction of records and complaints of abuse lodged by undocumented immigrants in detention center.

The longer-term step starts with supporting immigration reform efforts on overhauling the nation’s immigration system. Certainly reformers can’t help in directly crafting policy. But they can help give political support by simply signing on to letters, teaming up on advocacy efforts that advance both immigration and school reform.

Meanwhile school reformers can work on eliminating the presence of police officers in schools. Besides the documented evidence that the presence of law enforces leads to overuse of harsh school discipline and exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline, they can also end up being used by ICE as tools to identify and deport undocumented immigrant children and their families. As a result, getting cops out of schools helps improve school cultures for all children.

The Trump Administration has once again made clear its policy agenda of harming the futures of poor and minority children. As reformers, we must make sure it fails in its immoral goal.

Featured photo courtesy of Chip Somodevilla.

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