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<p>I think the state legislature in Connecticut was influenced by the $$ issue when it came to approving instate tuition for certain illegal immigrants:</p>
<p>“State Sen. Edward Meyers, D-Guilford, said a study done by Texas after it passed its instate tuition bill, found illegal immigrant students returned $5 to the state for every $1 spent educating them, while the longterm costs of denying them college was $319 billion in lost revenues and social costs.”</p>
<p>Same in our state:</p>
<p>Tuition break for illegal immigrants: Western universities offer “in-state” rates - Update</p>
<p>Jean Marie Angelo
No sooner had regents at the University of California voted in January to grant in-state tuition rates to state-based illegal immigrants, than attention turned to the same issue in Washington and Utah. Lawmakers in both of these states as welt are considering a similar move. Texas already has a law that extends in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.</p>
<p>“The fact of the matter is that we have a large number of immigrants in our state,” says Washington State Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez-Kenney (D-Seattle), who adds that this population comprises not just Hispanic people, but Russians and Asians, too. “There is a need to allow them access to higher education. We do that for illegal immigrants in K-12, regardless of their status.”</p>
<p>The in-state tuition rate for a year of study at the University of Washington is $3,800, less than one-third of the annual $12,000 out-of-state tuition rate. The break would be quite a boon for the state’s illegal immigrants. However, as in California, legislators in Washington will ask for some caveats to the new ruling: Illegal immigrants who are accepted to the University of Washington will have to prove they are in the process of gaining legal U.S. citizenship. UC already requires that proof, as welt as verification of graduation from a California high school.</p>
<p>Why would legislators and educators consider such tuition breaks during a recession? The economy is obviously not the driving factor here; UC regents say they believe offering the relief is the right thing to do.</p>
<p>But the move also sends a positive message to a growing Latino voter bloc in California, adds David Hayes-Bautista, a professor at UCLA’s School of Medicine. He is one of a group of Hispanic faculty members that meets with UC’s president to advise on Latino issues in higher education. Latinos currently account for one-third of the California population, but represent only 17 percent of registered voters, according to the 2000 census (that figure is up from 7 percent, in 1990). Allowing access to higher education for California’s illegal immigrants–many of whom are Hispanic–encourages them to gain legal status, as well as voting rights, says Hayes-Bautista. It also leads to greater access to gainful employment.</p>
<p>Hayes-Bautista quells fears that California’s instate tuition decision will result in providing education at a less expensive rate to a “limitless pool” of illegal-immigrant students. At most, he says, there will be 70 to 200 students in California impacted annually because of the specific requirements for eligibility. Kenney offers a similar estimate for the University of Washington.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>But it isn’t a huge bonanza: when they looked in Oregon, they could only find 17 illegal immigrants of any kind among the 59,000 students in public colleges and universities. The overwhelming number of Hispanic students they found were CITIZENS.</p>
<p>“But it isn’t a huge bonanza: when they looked in Oregon, they could only find 17 illegal immigrants of any kind among the 59,000 students in public colleges and universities. The overwhelming number of Hispanic students they found were CITIZENS.”</p>
<p>All Hispanics, especially the ones from more educated bakgrounds, did not come here illegally. Besides the data from NYC, which shows that Mexican teenagers (citizens or not) drop out of HS at an astoundingly high rate, I still haven’t seen any data that substantiates the upward mobility of illegals or their children occurring at a rate comparable to other groups, such as Asians or Russians.</p>
<p>The above quote also demonstrates that the illegals (many of whom would be college age) are not attending these colleges, for various reasons that have not stopped other immigrant groups in the past.</p>
<p>Before this country makes sch a big commitment to absorbing 20-40 million illegals, it needs to have analyses that are complete, nationwide, and not so subject to manipulating the statistics. For instance, I do not see free medical care for illegals and how that affects access to care for citizens factored into most analyses.</p>
<p>Collegialmom, here’s one solution to covering costs: more federal/state cooperation in using illegal immigrant labor’s unused tax withholdings:</p>
<p>"Some analysts say that, since immigrants are young, they contribute more through taxes than they consume in government services. That’s especially true, they maintain, because illegal immigrants cannot collect many public benefits, such as welfare and unemployment. On the other hand, being young also means that immigrants tend to have children who attend public schools. If the immigrants are low income, as most undocumented workers are, they pay modest taxes, so their children’s education is a net cost to taxpayers… Immigrants’ taxes largely go to the federal treasury as income tax and Social Security payments. By some estimates, about half of undocumented workers use fake Social Security numbers, allowing taxes to be withheld from their paychecks. But the services immigrants consume, such as education and health care, most often come out of state and local budgets. </p>
<p>A recent analysis by investment research firm Standard & Poor’s found that the Social Security Administration receives about $7 billion a year in payroll taxes that can’t be linked to valid names. S&P presumed that most of those funds come from undocumented workers. If that money were diverted to state and local governments, it would pay about half of the education costs for undocumented workers’ children, S&P said."</p>
<p>I actually found a lot of information about the problems of persistent poverty among Mexican immigrants and their children, as well as future generations. </p>
<p>From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas:</p>
<p>“Immigrants Assimilate: But to What?
The children of immigrants, including Mexican-Americans, outperform the first generation. Their progress is encouraging and indicative of the melting pot at work. But ethnic discrepancies emerge in the third generation, where Hispanic immigrants assimilate to an ethnic educational outcome below the national average.
Mexican immigrants are a good example of this. They make up the largest and least-educated immigrant group. While they make the biggest gains after coming to the United States, they lag behind the national average in education and wage outcomes after several generations because they assimilate not to the national schooling average but to the Hispanic average. In sum, worrying about immigrant assimilation boils down to worrying about ethnic differences in educational outcomes in the United States.” </p>
<p>From the Heritage Foundation:
"Ethnicity and Education Among the Non-Immigrant Population
Concern over the low levels of education and high levels of poverty among first-generation immigrants might be mitigated if these problems quickly vanished in future generations. However, the evidence indicates that, to a con<em>siderable degree, these problems will persist far into the future. Among the heads of non-immigrant families, His</em>panics still have the highest level of high school drop-outs and the lowest level of college graduation. Some 27 percent of non-immigrant Hispanic heads lack a high school degree, compared to 10.2 percent among non-immi*grant Asians. Only 12.3 percent of non-immigrant Hispanic heads have a college degree; the rate among non-immigrant Asians is 49.1 percent.</p>
<p>While second-generation Hispanics do show improvements in education and wages relative to first-generation His<em>panic immigrants, these improvements plateau in the third and subsequent generations. These subsequent genera</em>tions do not show improvements relative to second-generation Hispanics; education, in particular, stagnates at a comparatively low level. Continuing low levels of education mean that the descendants of Hispanic immigrants are on a “slow assimilation trajectory” relative to the rest of society.[16] Low education levels contribute to high levels of persistent
poverty."</p>
<p>It’s really not a matter of money, it is what mix of immigrants this country wants, and how to regulate this mix. I would think that if we want 15 million immigrants, it would be more productive to balance it with educated immigrants, in fact I would venture to say that the majority should be, and overall not in such massive numbers.</p>
<p>As to diverting Soc Sec money to fund education for illegals and their kids, good luck, it will never happen.</p>
<p>There’s been a lot of research on education for Hispanic students. Unfortunately, many schools are using (often by district or state mandate) practices that simply do not work but are ideologically popular. In the district where I live now, ELL students are not supposed to use L1-L2 dictionaries as references, ever. Imagine having to learn a foreign language without ever being able to look up a word! They’re required from the very beginning to rewrite all of their sentences with 100% correct grammar and punctuation, even though studies show that this has no benefit for beginning learners and just slows them down and frustrates them. </p>
<p>Some teachers tell parents they should use only English in the home, even if the parents are very poor speakers of English themselves. Parents of young children are told they should not read to their children in Spanish. As a result, children are deprived of the rich language environments crucial to their development and end up truly fluent in neither language. What makes this even sadder is the fact that bilingual students tend to do better on both IQ and achievement tests than monolingual peers.</p>
<p>conyat,
bilingualism was outlawed in my State because it had proven not to work, period. Not working then, not working where it is (surreptitiously) employed now. However, immersion in a 2nd lang. does work best in the younger ages; was true “then,” and true now. Excellent immersion schools for the younger set are producing dramatically excellent results, but there are few of them. Where such methodology is employed well, it results in equal bilingualism which yes, mutually strengthens both languages & overall learning (cognitive connections).</p>
<p>What I see occurring in the publics right now is extreme inattention to <em>oral</em> fluency – and I’m not limiting this observation to Latino students, by any means. I include native English speakers. Connections are not being reinforced between oral & written skills. Some of my Hispanic students write slightly better English than they speak, & in many cases their spoken English is unintelligible, although they have been in this country from birth. Recitation of any kind has gone by the wayside across classrooms in general. It is affecting the written fluency of my E1 students <em>and</em> E2 students.</p>
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<p>Bilingualism wasn’t outlawed because it wasn’t best practice. It was outlawed because it wasn’t popular with the voters.</p>
<p>Let’s look at what happened after California mostly outlawed bilingual education.</p>
<p>In the wake of Proposition 227, scores for all students went up (other reforms were made at about the same time, such as smaller class sizes). But did the achievement gap narrow even a smidgeon? NOPE. ELL students didn’t make up any ground at all.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.wested.org/cs/we/view/rs/804[/url]”>http://www.wested.org/cs/we/view/rs/804</a></p>
<p>“During this time, [5 years] the performance gap between English learners and native English speakers has remained virtually constant in most subject areas for most grades.” </p>
<p>“The likelihood of an English learner meeting the linguistic and academic criteria needed to reclassify them to fluent English proficient status after 10 years in California schools is less than 40 percent.”</p>
<p>So what about bilingualism? Is it any better? Johns Hopkins says so, after reviewing 17 scientific studies, many of them multi-year, covering 30 years of bilingual education results:</p>
<p>“Calling for an end to ideological debates on teaching English language learners to read, a new report analyzing more than three decades of research finds that bilingual education programs produce higher levels of student achievement in reading than English-only approaches for this rapidly growing population.”</p>
<p>"The analysis, conducted by Robert Slavin of Tthe Johns Hopkins University and Alan Cheung of the Success for All Foundation, also found that students participating in paired bilingual programs – those offering ongoing instruction in a native language and English at different times of the day – made the most dramatic gains in reading performance compared to their English-only peers."</p>
<p>“The report’s findings stand in direct contrast to actions taken by the federal government and states such as Arizona, California, and Massachusetts, which have limited the amount of instruction ELL students may receive in their native language.”</p>
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<p>The opposition is political and ideological, not pedagogical.</p>
<p>No, not at all. The pedagogy had mixed support, and overall poor results over time. Part of the problem was the unevenness in the approach (inconsistency, etc.). But there is no way that the results were uniformly or even mainly positive. The problem was not only inconsistent approaches (& their delivery), but inconsistent ways of measuring results. In fact it was culturally/political <em>popular</em>, but pragmatically unpopular, including by many Latino families. </p>
<p>Personally, I think the studies were as poorly drawn as the programs. (That has also been noted by commentators.) But to paint this rosy picture that it was just working keenly is to mislead others that bilingualism as a public education program is somehow going to turn around poor performance of Eng. Language Learners. Here’s what turns around poor performance: better educated parents (in any language), not to mention more fluent parents in the primary language.</p>
<p>Again, the well designed early-onset Engl immersion programs are quite promising, but they are worlds apart from what was previously being implemented in schools, and what is similarly creeping back (ineffectively) into them.</p>
<p>More about what’s happened in California since Proposition 227.</p>
<p><a href=“http://brj.asu.edu/v2412/articles/ar7.html[/url]”>http://brj.asu.edu/v2412/articles/ar7.html</a></p>
<p>Look at Appendix D. As you follow a cohort of children in the City Unified School District from grade to grade, from 1998 to 2000, the English Language Learner students become less and less likely to score above the 50th percentile on the SAT 9 compared to native speakers in the same district.</p>
<p>32% of the Spanish speaking first graders scored over the 50th percentile in 1998. By 2000, in third grade, that figured had dropped to 15%. The L1 students went down too, but not nearly as much.</p>
<p>Good literature review here.
<a href=“http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/SAT9analysis.htm[/url]”>http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/SAT9analysis.htm</a></p>
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<p>Great table on this website lets you see it for yourself.</p>
<p>So what about schools with bilingual programs?</p>
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<p>Bad teaching or badly designed programs aren’t going to work in any language. But the research shows that well designed bilingual education programs work better than English only. </p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.nabe.org/education/effective.html[/url]”>http://www.nabe.org/education/effective.html</a></p>
<p>This site explains some of the common fallacies about English Language Learners and instruction techniques in more detail:</p>
<p><a href=“http://library.educationworld.net/a6/a6-87.html[/url]”>http://library.educationworld.net/a6/a6-87.html</a></p>
<p>Also, please see discussion of the George Mason University study of 40,000 LEP students over 13 years. It found that students in quality bilingual education programs caught up to their English speaking peers in all subjects in 4-7 years…three years earlier than LEP students in English only programs. </p>
<p><a href=“sharingsuccess.org”>sharingsuccess.org;
<p>I guess what I’m trying to say is that the research simply doesn’t support any benefits for depriving children of the opportunity to be fluent in their first language before requiring them to be fluent in a foreign language…it proves just the opposite, and the effects are dramatic.</p>
<p>“Nothing’s wrong with people staying in one place. But it’s one of the reasons people don’t have jobs. In many cases, it’s not because the illegals took the jobs, but because people find it more to their benefit and the benefit of their community to stay where they are then to move to where the jobs are.”</p>
<p>So now we have post-katrina New Orleans. The locals can’t move back because the Mexicans have all the jobs and have gobbled up all the housing. That leaves what for your average NOLA HS graduate? I guess he can be a nuclear physicist or a grug dealer.God know he can’t get a costruction job if he doesn’t speak Spanish.</p>
<p>conyat, we’re going to have to agree to disagree on what approaches work best and which do not. (And further, whether any state should devote the time & cash needed to educate masses of immigrants coming from largely peasant backgrounds OVER its native inhabitants. That is, the only bilingual programs which have worked well have been intensive in their own right, requiring significant resources & training. Half such effort would be needed if family literacy prior to immigration were one of our national policy priorities.) I also object to your choice of the word “depriving” (them), which is shifting the responsibility to the U.S., vs. that of Mexico, which is the country guilty of deprivation of its citizens in many areas, economically, educationally, politically. It’s enormously expensive & labor-intensive – unremunerated by the party responsible – for another society to compensate for the basic needs of foreign-born arrivals ON THIS SCALE. And it makes the U.S. the complicit enablers of the corrupt pattern of Mexican society.</p>
<p>The designer bilingual programs that you have read about & I have read about are a luxury that our public schools can ill afford right now, but bilingualism sounds good when you say it real fast.</p>
<p>The bilingual approaches currently being used are not of the variety that are the subject of those research studies. They are crude & ineffective: I’ve watched them; I saw them in operation just this week, & in different environments over the last several months. However, a school I observed just last month, which is firm on English-only in the whole school environment, is astoundingly effective (judging by superior oral & written proficiency). The school is rather famous for expecting such fluency, and it does get it. (Again, a dominant Latino population) There is no parallel or alternating spanish instruction (or materials in Spanish) in the classroom or on the school grounds.</p>
<p>All I know is that aside from Special Ed, the other big gobbler of education budget dollars (to the tune of millions) is ELL, at least where I live.</p>
<p>And since it’s a “mandate”, we can’t touch that funding either.</p>
<p>Too bad regular ed kids have to have classes of 25-30,while ELL or SPED kids get ratios of 1-2 or 1-3.</p>
<p>I have no answers, but I just see the reality on the ground.</p>
<p>Yes. (Allmusic) And as to the costs of language learning, they are comprehensive: materials now purchased by State & school districts, in Spanish, specialists relating to ELL (who would otherwise not drain the State budget), the entire complex credentialing program & the training costs related to ELL aspects of that. Both the formal & the de facto bilingualism within education have enormously drained the State & will continue to do so.</p>
<p>Those who live in high-rent school districts, or less impacted regions, do not see this necessarily. They can comfortably sit in ivory towers, dispensing a generous (profligate) idealism which may have little impact on them. So I relate to Allmusic’s comment about “being on the ground.” The dominant public school culture & priorities, as I said earlier, are Latino. It has been years since I’ve seen a prominent African-American presence, or a mixed minority presence, in classrooms in my State.</p>
<p>The US has taken on the project of educating millions of children of illegal immigrants who are largely uneducated themselves. These children often have no home support for education, for various reasons, so reading to them in either language doesn’t happen. The parents would also have to have the time or interest to become literate in either Spanish or English.</p>
<p>If generations of Mexican immigrants do not progess like other groups in terms of education, then the US will continue to spend billions of dollars trying to change a group of people who do not have the same priorities. We are not playing educational catch-up with other groups, such as Asian, European or Middle Eastern immigrants. </p>
<p>The effort to redo what Mexico can’t do for its citizens costs a lot of money. If the Mexican illegal immigrants are going to continue to be encouraged to come here, then we all will be paying the price for their education, while trying to convince ourselves that excluding other groups legally is worth the price. </p>
<p>How about Mexico begin to educate its own people? Or pay us to do it for Mexicans here, since the money sent back to Mexico is such an important part of its GNP, and it is in its best interest to have its citizens here?</p>
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<p>Bad teaching isn’t going to work no matter what methods are used. </p>
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<p>Fortunately, it’s not up to us to agree or disagree on this–any more than it’s up to us to agree or disagree on evolution. The research has settled the question, however unpopular the answer might be in some quarters.</p>
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<p>This is the real objection. It’s ideological and political. Why should “peasants” get best practices?</p>
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<p>You didn’t read the “Common Fallacies” link, then. The cost difference is not that great, and it’s definitely cheaper than paying the cost of what English only is doing, leaving ELL students further and further behind each year. </p>
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<p>Higherlead, this is such bunk. Why are you continuing to try to sell it?</p>
<p>There are plenty of jobs for anyone who wants to return. Right now, as I’ve pointed out, there are $15/hr jobs at the Chalmette Refinery that are only available to citizens, that have constant vacancies. And these are jobs just to stand around and make sure other people follow some simple rules. No special skills or training required. A high school diploma is plenty enough of a credential.</p>
<p>This is more money than schoolteachers make. </p>
<p>And speaking of schoolteachers, there’s a severe shortage of substitute teachers and school bus drivers, and cafeteria workers. All jobs for citizens only that are going unfilled.</p>
<p>Yes, there are housing issues, but you can’t blame that on the Mexicans. They came down here and were willing to live under bridges, in the backs of pickup trucks, and in tents to work until housing opened up. </p>
<p>And when you look at housing to earnings, it’s not that far out of line from pre-K. I have two relatives who are still in rental apartments after Katrina, while they wait on their houses to be finished. Each is paying about $1500 a month. That’s steep for New Orleans, but affordable if you’re making $15/hr. 50% of gross pay for rent was a pretty typical rent amount here pre-K, however high it might be elsewhere.</p>
<p>The two reasons there aren’t enough housing: 1. Not enough people to build it fast enough. Construction companies are having to shut down jobs looking for craftsmen. Roofers have long waits even for estimates. 2. Insurance/Road home issues. People don’t have the money to rebuild their homes, or if they do, the cost of homeowners’ insurance prices them out the market. I know one woman in IT who is selling her house and leaving because her homeowners jumped to $700 a month.</p>
<p>Many of the people who can’t return were in PUBLIC HOUSING prior to Katrina (“The projects”). The reason they can’t return is the lack of public housing, because the many of the units in the large projects are uninhabitable and haven’t been rebuilt. Mexicans aren’t living in PUBLIC HOUSING, because it’s not an option. </p>
<p>However, housing isn’t the only issue. A very significant issue for many people is the lack of access to medical services, especially people on Medicaid or who have to rely on the state for free care. I have a friend that I drive to his appointments. He’s a diabetic in poor health. Blood sugar ranges from 300-500, extensive nerve damage. They put him on insulin and could not give him a follow up appointment for 6 months. If he misses an appointment, it’s too bad; he has to wait another 4-6 months before they can fit him in again.</p>
<p>What’s happening is NOT that people CAN’T find work or housing to return. It’s that people come back, and in 6-12 months, despite having work and housing, they decide that it’s not in their best interests to live here. Crime is high, access to medical services is low, the infrastructure is in bad shape. So it’s not surprising that some people decide it’s not in their best interests to come back here, job and housing regardless.</p>
<p>No one is being displaced by Mexicans, period. And lying about it isn’t going to make it so.</p>
<p>You name me 5 people that want to return, seriously, and are able to work and can pass a background check, and within one week, I will find them jobs and housing that’s no more than 50% of their take home pay.</p>
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<p>Lots of luck convincing Bush of this. He wants our Social Security system to pay immigrants for credits they earned in Mexico’s system.</p>
<p>Again, other immigrant groups have not required bilingual teaching, in fact, most shun it, because they feel they can learn their first language at home, and need to learn English at school. If English is taught in the schools here, then that becomes the “only practice.”</p>
<p>I don’t think we should have a double standard for groups of immigrants.</p>
<p>Anyhow, with the drop-out rate of English speakers in the cities so high, shouldn’t this country be concentrating on those students?</p>
<p>As to Bush, he’s out, I don’t think can accomplish anything, totally lame duck, can’t even keep his advisors anymore.</p>