Jan Resseger: Heritage Foundation Wants to Deny the Right to Public Schooling for Undocumented Immigrant Children
The new attack on public education is the criticism of how many immigrants a district serves. Heritage Foundation signaled this new right wing complaint back in April when they came out with a startling proposal. Jan Resseger looked at the reaction. Reposted with permission.
I like to think I know enough about awful public policy that it would be hard to surprise me, but I confess that the beginning of Kalyn Belsha’s new report for Chalkbeat describes a politics so indecent that I was shocked:
“An influential conservative think tank has laid out a strategy to challenge a landmark Supreme Court decision that protects the right of undocumented children to attend public school. The Heritage Foundation, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to craft a policy playbook for a second Trump presidential term… released a brief calling on states to require public schools to charge unaccompanied migrant children and children with undocumented parents tuition to enroll.” (You can look at the Heritage Foundation’s very short policy brief which is part of Heritage’s Project 2025 that lays out an extremely conservative platform.)
Belsha explains Heritage’s reasoning for this cruelty: “Such a move ‘would draw a lawsuit from the Left,’ the brief states, ‘which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision’—referring to the 1982 ruling that held it was unconstitutional to deny children a public education based on their immigration status.”
We like to think we are kinder and more civilized in America than we used to be in the days of slavery, Jim Crow, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, but I guess the Heritage Foundation feels comfortable taking us back to 1975, when Texas passed a law to deny undocumented children the right, enjoyed by all children in the United States, to a free public education.
Belsha explains: “Texas passed a law in 1975 saying that public schools would not receive state funding for the education of undocumented children and that districts could bar these students from attending public school for free. Two years later, the Tyler Independent School District started charging undocumented children $1,000 a year to attend school—a sum district officials knew would be unaffordable for the area’s immigrant families who often worked in Tyler’s famous rose industry, along with meat-packing plants and farms.”
A lawsuit challenging the Texas plan eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in 1982, declared the Texas statute unconstitutional. The Court also defined the public purpose of our system of public schools, accessible to all children. In the majority opinion in Plyler v. Doe, Justice William Brennan wrote:
“A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”