Andru Volinsky lives in New Hampshire, where he has been active in politics and protecting public schools. He served on the state’s Executive Council, he successfully litigated a challenge to the state’s system for funding public schoools. He ran for Governor in 2020 and unfortunately was not elected. He writes here about the risks that America’s immigrant children face today.
His article was posted on the blog of the Network for Public Education.
Andru Volinsky: The Threat to Public School Access for Children of Immigrants
Andru Volinsky alerts us to one of the other threats to education that may be coming for immigrant children.
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?”
Read the full post here. You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/andru-volinsky-the-threat-to-public-school-access-for-children-of-immigrants/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The goal of public schooling has been “College and Career Ready” for some time now. (this messaging starts in Kindergarten BTW!) The era of educating the masses to be “good citizens” is over. And it is over due to NCLB, RTtT and Common Bore/standardized testing…..education DEFORM! Can’t have it both ways….sorry!
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According to The 74 , “Trump and his allies, who plan to use the military to carry out massive deportations at the onset of his second term, have made clear their intention to:
If this happens, we should dismantle The Statue of Liberty and return the remains to France. We are unworthy of such a gift. I fear for many of my former unregistered students, many of whom are self-employed entrepreneurs and some of whom have college degrees. Since most of these undocumented people came here as children, they are far more American than they are a product of their country of origin. They work hard, obey the law and pay their taxes. It is not their fault that gutless politicians are afraid to fix our broken immigration system. What Trump and company intend to do is as vile and heartless as what was done to the native population in this country. He and his band of racists will dismantle families from the inside out and punish the innocent. He will weaponize federal agents against vulnerable, hard working people that contribute far more to our economy than they receive.
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. . . is this some sort of new Christianity? (It certainly doesn’t look like the old one.) CBK
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Looks a lot like the old xtianity from my point of view.
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Hi Duane: . . . not in my experience, FWIW. CBK
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To reduce undocumented immigration, the U.S. government should end punishing economic sanctions on sooooo many countries. Many immigrants are economic refugees seeking to escape harsh conditions created by U.S. economic sanctions. Moreover, Americans should support an international labor movement addressing the concerns of working class citizens. Workers should cooperate with each other, not compete against each other. Right now, the U.S. rations access to education, just as it rations access to health care.
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enitrely agreed
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entirely
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Disgusting. Not only does it violate human rights to deny children and education, but it’s also stupid, because taxpayers will have to pay MORE in the long run as a result of having an uneducated population.
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Having an educated populace is an investment in the future. It was one of the rationales behind the Plyler v. Doe decision in 1982. Trump and his bigots intend to remove the undocumented so he intends to deny them access to public education. We haven’t had a coherent immigration plan in decades. We have unregistered people that have been in this country for more than forty years. Trump’s plan would cause incalculable suffering and economic damage to the US economy. Some people see Trump’s deportation plan as part of a real estate grab when the long standing undocumented with assets are deported.
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Retired: Now you don’t need a conspiracy theory to think a real estate grab is a plausible intention of the Trump tribe. Rather, it flows from the question: How do they do things? Answer: like any other mobster, only now in exaggerated fashion. CBK
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All we have to do is remember what happened after our recession in 2008. Private equity vultures consolidated resources and bought up the housing inventory in a number of cities. It drove up prices and turned a lot more Americans into renters. A guiding principle of disaster capitalism is “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
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Retired: . . . as with Trump, even if you have to create the crisis, either real or in people’s minds, in the first place.
Your note reminded me of an interview between Charlie Rose on his show (remember him?) and some real estate “vulture” mogul who was buying up houses in the Midwest like crazy, so that he could rent them out–and Rose was oh-so-congratulatory of an “entrepreneur.”
I don’t remember the guy’s name but do remember thinking at the time how different it is to own rather than to rent a home–and now I understand how, if overdone, it also affects a community. But that guy was oblivious, as was Rose . . . or maybe they weren’t. CBK
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I think this is another GOP effort to loosen child labor laws by creating a loophole, so US born children living with illegal immigrant parents will become another cheap source of labor like they were before the child labor laws were passed in the 1930s, protecting children from that form of abuse.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/some-lawmakers-propose-loosening-child-labor-laws-to-fill-worker-shortage
“Project 2025 Would Exploit Child Labor by Allowing Minors To Work in Dangerous Conditions With Fewer Protections
“The elimination of protections for young workers, if enacted, would lead more children to work in dangerous workplaces such as factories and slaughterhouses—as well as increase the likelihood of injuries and death—to the benefit of greedy corporations.”
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-exploit-child-labor-by-allowing-minors-to-work-in-dangerous-conditions-with-fewer-protections/
“Earlier this week Republican state lawmakers in Wisconsin circulated a new bill that would allow workers as young as 14 years old to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants, down from the state’s current age minimum of 18 years old. The legislative proposal “creates a simple solution” to workforce staffing issues, said the Republican bill sponsors in a memo they circulated to colleagues on Monday.
“Wisconsin is not the only state looking to loosen labor laws affecting minors, and over the last few months there have been been Republican-led bills in states like Arkansas, Ohio, and Iowa aimed at making it easier for teenagers to work in more jobs and for more hours in the day.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/5/3/23702464/child-labor-laws-youth-migrants-work-shortage
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Lloyd: Sounds like slippery-slope colonialism (of The People) on its way to fascism. CBK
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On its way????
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Hi again Duane: I don’t even like to write the words . . . but No State political murders yet or disappearing “undesirable” people off the streets with no due process, etc. . . . yet. CBK
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Yes, those things have happened many times in the history of the US.
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Duane: . . . yes, but not as arbitrary State policy. CBK
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Yes, they have been part of “arbitrary State policy.”
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Duane: Your absolute idealism is showing. If you cannot see the difference–and you won’t be able to see the difference from that viewpoint, then there’s nothing I can say to help you understand. CBK
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Duane–I have been bothered by my too-quick response to your note. The problem in my own thinking was with missing the distinction between (1) policy (as in legitimate OR arbitrary State policy) and (2) the democratic foundations of the United States as are so different from other countries and orders of state, e.g., like Putin’s Russia. Also, I was not referring to the states and their policies but to “the state” as in U.S. federal government’s policies.
My point, however, would have been better served this way: first, the foundations of this U.S. Democracy are written into our founding documents (need I restate them here, but to include due process for all); they are as close to ideal, I think, as human history will allow including the fact that they “breath” . . . meaning that they can undergo non-arbitrary processes of change along with changes in history.
Further, insofar as the foundations and their flow into legitimate policy are defined by being non arbitrary, as in “the king says so, so it is policy,” it rather flows in a dialogic conversation from the foundational order of the State, back to and through “the people,” and through the branches of a duly elected Government into law and policy, then there can be no “arbitrary policy of the State.”
That is not to say that rules, laws, and policies are not regularly broken, and even the Constitution, as we so recently have witnessed. But “broken” policy, et al, in such a situation does not mean “arbitrary.” Thanks. CBK
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Here is an example. From Wiki: “According to the United States government, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki’s father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.[2] Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a CIA drone strike several days before his son’s death.[3]
The U.S. drone strike that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was conducted under a policy approved by U.S. President Barack Obama.”
The “king” Obama arbitrarily (by that I mean outside the law, i.e., breaking laws in the process) declared that they both needed to be eliminated
I can go through time and pick many examples of extra-judicial killings by the authorities whether local, state or federal.
To think, as you appear to do, that these things haven’t happened. . . well. . . can I get some of those Xanax, Valium or whatever pill you must be taken that blinds you to those atrocities.
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Duane . . . no, you are right in what you say.
The big “however,” however, is that, by your own judgment, these events do not fall under the general but also concrete and lived order set out in the U.S. Constitution and our founding documents–though even THAT can be argued into eternity, so to speak. One need not resort to anomaly as those events can be understood in many ways that still do not fly in the face of the order set out in those documents. Those ways can be expressed in Orwellian or in legitimate terms.
The contrast, then, is between arbitrary power (as in rule-by-fear e.g., Putin or other fascist dictators) and power that (though I am sure can be endlessly questioned as is common in democratic political environments) is NOT about keeping one’s personal powers and arbitrary wants in place, but in protecting the wherewithal of what goes by presidential power via a people’s ongoing and living investment in democracy. (I’m surprised you do not already understand that difference–between Putin’s Russia and Obama’s United States?)
BTW, the Supreme Court just granted to Trump a limited immunity from accountability for crimes–an accountability that was already assumed to be in place before that ruling. I doubt you’ll find anything like that in, for instance, Putin’s Russia. CBK
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Duane: the most elemental difference has to do with the sources and flow of power–in a democracy, it’s from and through the people to the leaders and back again–as in a “smooth transition of power” to a newly elected president. Juxtapose that with leaders in fascist regimes.
Abuses of that power are just that: abuses. And that whole idea is presently under threat–partly because almost half of the country has no understanding of exactly these points, or of what’s really going on and what they are risking with their ignorance. (My other note went into moderation.) CBK
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All of this is extraordinarily frightening. WWJD?
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Maybe some of us retired teachers could open totally unregulated schools in the voucher states to teach those kids- like the Irish “hedge schools.”
No one would know or care, and we could teach all the citizenship skills we wanted.
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Great idea!
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Yes, “great idea,” but know they’d find some way to put a stop to such schools–and can sound quite reasonable in doing so.
But when you lose due process for everyone based on already-written rules of law, the “rule” becomes whoever has brute power wins.
And on that precipice is where we are right now. CBK
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Speaking of how intimidation tactics work, 60 Minutes had a piece on the Israeli use of those small bombs in pocket phones–the phones were scary enough, but apparently now everyone is afraid to even turn on their air conditioners for fear they’ll spark an explosion (Leslie Stahl interview). CBK
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This might well turn out to be the greatest evil ever perpetrated in the United States. Oh, and Stephen Miller is freaking Satan.
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