Reversal of Plyler v. Doe on the horizon.
From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
The Covid 19 pandemic saw unprecedented learning loss from reduced access to public schools. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in 2022, for example, only 26 percent of eighth graders were at or above proficient in math. Less than a third of fourth graders (32 percent) were at or above proficient in reading.
What if there aren’t public schools at all?
School children who cannot prove they are legally in the US may soon be threatened with exclusion from public schools. Since 1982, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Plyler v. Doe, public schools have been required to accept children who immigrate to the US, regardless of their legal status. The Plyer opinion, however, was issued by a deeply divided court (five different justices wrote opinions) with only a bare majority deciding in favor of the school children. And now, much like the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the Plyler decision is under attack by right-wing extremists. Texas governor Gregg Abbott has publicly challenged the decision and it appears there is an organized effort to overturn the right of immigrant children to attend public schools.
Earlier this year, the Saugus, MA School Committee adopted stringent proof of legal residency requirements for its school children shortly after Massachusetts governor Maura Healey announced a state of emergency concerning Massachusetts’ over 5000 recent immigrants, many of whom were from Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Saugus is a town of about 30,000 residents located just outside of Boston. The immigrants from these three nations were legally admitted to the US under a Biden administration special humanitarian parole program adopted in 2023.
Legislators in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas recently also considered legislation to either explicitly bar children from attending public school if they cannot prove they are legally in the US or to require extensive proof of legal residency that can then give local officials excuse not to admit students. The Saugus School Committee is reported to have deployed this tactic to delay admission of a six-year-old girl from Nicaragua for six months.
According to a Pew study released in July 2024, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States was 11.0 million in 2022, the most recent year available. About 850,000 of these immigrants were children under 18.
About 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent. More than eight million workers in the US are unauthorized immigrants. Only 5 percent of these unauthorized workers are single persons without children. The remainder are heads of families most of which are of mixed legality of their immigration status.
If we exclude children from public schools because of their immigration status, how can we expect them to become “good citizens?”
A unanimous Supreme Court wrote in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that education “is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
Immigrant families are not going away. In many parts of our country, unauthorized immigrants perform work important to our economy. Many families are of mixed immigration status or include children who are citizens because they were born here.
What do we expect to happen to children excluded from public schools but who remain in the country? As Larry Daves, the lawyer who argued the Plyler v. Doe case has said, they will become part of a permanent underclass in our feudal society.
The threat is real.
Two of President-elect Trump’s first appointments are Steven Miller to be his deputy chief of staff and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS oversees our nation’s borders. In the first Trump administration, Miller was responsible for the family separation policy that to this day has been unable to locate and re-unite 1000 of the 5000 children who were traumatically separated from their parents to punish and deter illegal immigration. Noem shoots dogs.
Worse, given the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan to dismantle the US Department of Education, the federal government may be able to withhold or reduce block grant funding to states who refuse to toe the line on the exclusion of immigrant children from public schools.
NH has already taken an extreme position with respect to unauthorized immigrant students in higher education. What will NH do at the urging of President-elect Trump? NH is one of only six states to deny in-state tuition and access to our state’s few state scholarships to students who are unauthorized immigrants. NH also prohibits unauthorized immigrants from obtaining drivers licenses.
Just three states are more extreme than NH. Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia bar students who are unauthorized immigrants from attending public colleges and universities at all. Maine has some restrictions similar to NH. Vermont has none, Massachusetts affirmatively bars discrimination against unauthorized immigrants.
According to Larry Daves, the Texas native and lead lawyer in Plyler, the plaintiffs he represented had lived in Texas for years, owned homes and were taxpayers. The plaintiffs also often had children while living in the US making some of their children eligible for public school while older children were excluded.
Daves gives part of the credit for his team winning the case to the US Department of Justice under President Jimmy Carter. The Justice Department joined the case on the side of the plaintiff children.
When the Senate convenes in the new year to review Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, it’ll be an appropriate time for one of our good senators to quote Pete Seeger, and ask:
Whose side are you on?
Will the nominee for Attorney General recommend the administration support the Plyler precedent or condemn almost one million children to second-class citizenship?
We already know the answer but it would be good to get the Senate and the Administration on record.
