Plyler v. Doe Decision Crushing School Districts

With the Democratic elites unceremoniously booting out President Joe Biden and the ensuing non-stop speculation about the forthcoming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, the ongoing border disaster is getting less coverage. But with families preparing to send their children back to public school, analyzing the illegal immigration surge’s effect on the nation’s education system is timely.

As a former instructor to English Language Learners—now called Limited English Proficient—who taught in California’s heavily legal and illegal-dominated San Joaquin Valley---60% Hispanic and Asian---I closely follow education issues as they relate to immigration. The Biden administration’s open border policy has put U.S. citizen K-12 students at a severe disadvantage. Every non-English speaking student that enrolls takes teachers’ time away from educating native-born children. Adding to the teacher’s burden is the illegal immigrants’ erratic enrollment pattern. Not all illegal immigrants cross the border at the same time, and therefore do not present themselves in the classroom on the same date. The teacher’s responsibility is to acclimate the new non-English speaking student to the classroom routine, a major and often insurmountable challenge. New students arrive throughout the school year and because the world knows that the border is open, illegal immigrants from China, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America, all speaking different languages, come continuously. I taught after the Southeast Asian war ended; the students were Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, nationalities that had long-standing conflicts among each other, another problem. One solution to the language barrier was “pull outs.” Teaching aides who were Southeast Asians and spoke those countries’ native languages would work privately with the students in the corner of the classroom, a disruption for the other children. Worse, since the aide was not an experienced teacher, and the lead teacher had no idea if the aide was imparting the lesson plan correctly, the pull out served only as a distraction that left citizen students unattended. The neglected native-born students needed all the help they could get. Most came from low-income households; some from broken, fatherless families or mothers that struggled with addictions.

A map that the Center for Immigration Studies developed proves in its immigration and public school analysis that every state is indeed a border state. In Bellingham, Wash., 2,100 miles from Eagle Pass, Texas, the school district is 25% from immigrants’ families. The biggest sending country is Mexico, 44%; second is Japan,18%. In Minot, N.D., 1,800 miles from Eagle Pass, the school district is 7% from immigrant families; 72% from Mexico and 11% from Kirghizia. The education costs those school districts as well as the other nationwide districts, incur is excessive. The World Population Review (WPR) calculated that in the United States, federal, state, and local governments spend about $720.9 billion annually or $14,840 per pupil. The federal government provides 7.7% of funding, state governments provide 46.7%, and local governments provide 45.6%. States that the illegal immigration surge has dramatically hit include New York, where the per pupil cost is $20,040, 90% above the national average, the District of Columbia, $22,759 and Massachusetts, $17, 058. In total, the cost to educate illegal alien children or the citizen children of illegal immigrants is $7.6 billion.

Taxpayers wonder how it happened that they are responsible for funding the public education costs of countless illegally present aliens and anchor babies. The back story: In 1975, half a century ago, the Texas Legislature passed a law that denied state funds for illegal aliens’ children’s public education or for children who had not been legally admitted into the U.S., unaccompanied minors. District courts filed class action suits on behalf of illegally present school-age children. The courts initially ruled against Texas and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the1982 Plyler v. Doe case, SCOTUS ruled that the Texas law violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Consequently, all school-age children residing in the U.S. were given the right to attend public schools, a burdensome federal mandate. Chief Justice Warren Burger asserted that issues of whether to admit illegal immigrant children is a congressional responsibility and not the judiciary’s. Burger further argued that the Equal Protection Clause does not mandate identical treatment of various categories of persons and that Texas had a legitimate reason to distinguish between individuals who were residing in the country legally versus illegally.

The obvious rub is, of course, that 1975’s school age illegal alien population was a tiny fraction of today’s and was a problem mostly limited to Texas and California. An estimate of the total current illegal alien population is 11.5 million, a figure that increases daily. Center for Immigration Studies researchers took a macro look at the effect immigration has on schools nationally. The picture shows the increasingly widespread challenges that teachers confront. In 2021, the eleven million public school students from legal and illegal immigrant-headed households accounted for one out of four or 23 percent of public-school students, double the 11 percent in 1990 and more than triple the 7 percent in 1980. States where the share of public-school students from immigrant households has increased the most from 1990 to 2021 are Delaware, from 2 to 25 percent, New Jersey, from 17 to 39 percent, Nevada, from 11 to 30 percent, Maryland, from 9 to 29 percent, Washington state, from 9 to 28 percent, North Carolina, from 2 to 19 percent, Virginia, from 6 to 23 percent, Georgia, from 3 to 19 percent, Massachusetts, from 13 to 28 percent, Florida, from 17 to 31 percent, New York, from 21 to 35 percent, Texas, from 17 to 31 percent, and Minnesota, from 4 to18 percent.

Regardless of SCOTUS’ decision, taxpayers should not be obligated to indefinitely fund the public school education of children illegally present or the citizen children of illegal aliens. Fifty years after Plyler, ample evidence supports Chief Justice Burger and the other dissenters ---Associate Justices Byron White, William Rehnquist, and Sandra Day O’Connor---that the Plyler ruling was incorrect and should therefore be overturned or at least modified to reflect the reality on the ground.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@isfpp.org