Mass. needs to codify education rights for immigrant students
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I learned the details of this inspiring story while researching my book 'Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education.
'
But now some states are challenging some of my students' right to an education. In the past several months,
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The court made the right decision in 1982. And it is the right decision now.
It is right because the Constitution is clear: The 14th Amendment guarantees that 'no person' within the country's jurisdiction can be denied 'equal protection of the laws.' The promise extends to all persons, without qualification.
As
Federal District Judge William Justice, who first heard the case in 1977, wrote, denying undocumented students access to education would create a permanent underclass.
Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who authored the court's 1982 decision, wrote that denying undocumented students access to education would impose a 'lifetime hardship' that would be harmful to children and to the 'progress of our nation.'
Public school teachers know that immigrant students — regardless of their documentation status — bring extraordinary strengths to our classrooms that benefit all students and their communities.
I hope that the Supreme Court will hold firm on the crucial role of education, even as we see once-sacrosanct rights stripped away. In 2020, the Massachusetts Legislature had the foresight to
Similarly, the Legislature should take proactive steps to protect the right to education for all children in the Commonwealth.
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The State House is currently considering a bill that would codify Plyler at the state level as well as current federal provisions and guidance that protect immigrating students with disabilities and ensure immigrant families have access to qualified interpreters when interacting with schools.
Nearly 400 years ago, just three blocks from the state Capitol, Massachusetts opened our country's first public school. We know the vital role education plays for children, for communities, and for the future of the country.
The Legislature should affirm that education is vital for the success of Massachusetts and secure the promise of education for every child in our Commonwealth.
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Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
Trump killed affirmative action. His base might not like what comes next.
Proponents for affirmative action in higher education rally in front of the US Supreme Court on October 31, 2022, in Washington, Donald Trump's administration is scrutinizing higher education. Last week, the White House issued a memorandum requiring all universities receiving federal funds to submit admissions data on all applicants to the Department of Education. The goal is to enforce the 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action. Days before the memo was released, Columbia and Brown agreed to share their admissions data with the administration, broken down by race, grade point average, and standardized test scores. The administration suspects that universities are using 'racial proxies' to get around the ban on race-based admissions. The Department of Education is expected to build a database of the admissions data and make it available to parents and students. Amid this increased federal scrutiny, an alternative idea from Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project for the Progressive Policy Institute, is gaining attention. Kahlenberg, who testified in the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and UNC, advocates for class-based affirmative action instead of race-based admissions. He argues that this approach will yield more economically and racially equitable results. Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kahlenberg about how he contends with the consequences of helping gut race-based affirmative action, why he believes class-based affirmative action is the path forward, and if his own argument may come in the crosshairs of a Trump administration eager to stamp out all forms of affirmative action. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. You're the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. I would take it to mean that you are a progressive. It's complicated these days. I'm left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive. I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action. It doesn't sound like a progressive, or even a left-of-center, position. What was going on? Explain what you were thinking. I've long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that's enormously important, but I've been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated, but economically segregated. I think there's a better way of creating racial diversity — a more liberal way, if you will — which is to give low-income and economically disadvantaged students of all races a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity. What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that? Were primarily wealthy Black and Hispanic students benefiting from affirmative action? There'd been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action. Then, in the litigation, further evidence came out. At Harvard, 71 percent of the Black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic population nationally. Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer. But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting working-class and low-income students. Alright, so the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says, essentially, we're done with race-based affirmative action. Was there a difference in how progressives and conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling? Most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course, they were for economic affirmative action. But now we have some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity. What do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right? Well, I think it's troubling when people shift the goalposts. In a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case, conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice [Neil] Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal. And now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they're opposed to any kind of affirmative action. Are you surprised by that shift? I'm not surprised. I'm confident, however, that a majority of the US Supreme Court won't go that far. The Supreme Court, to some degree, looks to public opinion. Racial preferences were always unpopular. But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public. The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it, subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools, like Boston Latin. In both cases, the Supreme Court said we're not gonna hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices. So I'm fairly confident that the Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences. What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data? I'm of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education. These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money. We want to make sure they're following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can't use race. Having said that, I'm quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data, because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants, of those admitted, and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university's cheating and they're using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law. The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal. And because Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program. And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower. I'm worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action. Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more Black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact. Yes. Increasingly, that's what it looks like. As long as the Trump administration was focused on counting race and deciding who gets ahead, they had the American public on their side. But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies, they just don't like racial preferences as the means for getting there. So, if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I'm just opposed to racial diversity, he'll have lost the public. And I don't think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions, either. Do you think he cares?
Yahoo
an hour ago
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For Women Scotland launches legal action against Scottish ministers on gender policy
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Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
News Analysis: Newsom's decision to fight fire with fire could have profound political consequences
Deep in the badlands of defeat, Democrats have soul-searched about what went wrong last November, tinkered with a thousand-plus thinkpieces and desperately cast for a strategy to reboot their stalled-out party. Amid the noise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently championed an unlikely game plan: Forget the high road, fight fire with fire and embrace the very tactics that virtue-minded Democrats have long decried. Could the dark art of political gerrymandering be the thing that saves democracy from Trump's increasingly authoritarian impulses? That's essentially the pitch Newsom is making to California voters with his audacious new special election campaign. As Texas Democrats dig in to block a Republican-led redistricting push and Trump muscles to consolidate power wherever he can, Newsom wants to redraw California's own congressional districts to favor Democrats. His goal: counter Trump's drive for more GOP House seats with a power play of his own. It's a boundary-pushing gamble that will undoubtedly supercharge Newsom's political star in the short-term. The long-game glory could be even grander, but only if he pulls it off. A ballot-box flop would be brutal for both Newsom and his party. The charismatic California governor is termed out of office in 2026 and has made no secret of his 2028 presidential ambitions. But the distinct scent of his home state will be hard to completely slough off in parts of the country where California is synonymous with loony lefties, business-killing regulation and an out-of-control homelessness crisis. To say nothing of Newsom's ill-fated dinner at an elite Napa restaurant in violation of COVID-19 protocols — a misstep that energized a failed recall attempt and still haunts the governor's national reputation. The redistricting gambit is the kind of big play that could redefine how voters across the country see Newsom. The strategy could be a boon for Newsom's 2028 ambitions during a moment when Democrats are hungry for leaders, said Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio. But it's also a massive roll of the dice for both Newsom and the state he leads. 'It's great politics for him if this passes,' Maviglio said. 'If it fails, he's dead in the water.' The path forward — which could determine control of Congress in 2026 — is hardly a straight shot. The 'Election Rigging Response Act,' as Newsom has named his ballot measure, would temporarily scrap the congressional districts enacted by the state's voter-approved independent redistricting commission. Under the proposal, Democrats could pick up five seats currently held by Republicans while bolstering vulnerable Democratic incumbent Reps. Adam Gray, Josh Harder, George Whitesides, Derek Tran and Dave Min, which would save the party millions of dollars in costly reelection fights. But first the Democratic-led state Legislature must vote to place the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot and then it must be approved by voters. If passed, the initiative would have a 'trigger,' meaning the redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas or another GOP-led state moved forward with its own gerrymandering effort. 'I think what Governor Newsom and other Democrats are doing here is exactly the right thing we need to do,' Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said Thursday. 'We're not bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We're going to bring a bazooka to a knife fight, right? This is not your grandfather's Democratic Party,' Martin said, adding that they shouldn't be the only ones playing by a set of rules that no longer exist. For Democrats like Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who appeared alongside Newsom to kick off the effort, there is 'some heartbreak' to temporarily shelving their commitment to independent redistricting. But she and others were clear-eyed about the need to stop a president 'willing to rig the election midstream,' she said. Friedman said she was hearing overwhelmingly positive reactions to the proposal from all kinds of Democratic groups on the ground. 'The response that I get is, 'Finally, we're fighting. We have a way to fight back that's tangible,'' Friedman recounted. Still, despite the state's Democratic voter registration advantage, victory for the ballot measure will hardly be assured. California voters have twice rallied for independent redistricting at the ballot box in the last two decades and many may struggle to abandon those beliefs. A POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll found that voters prefer keeping an independent panel in place to draw district lines by a nearly two-to-one margin, and that independent redistricting is broadly popular in the state. (Newsom's press office argued that the poll was poorly worded, since it asked about getting rid of the independent commission altogether and permanently returning line-drawing power to the legislators, rather than just temporarily scrapping their work for several cycles until the independent commission next draws new lines.) California voters should not expect to see a special election campaign focused on the minutia of reconfiguring the state's congressional districts, however. While many opponents will likely attack the change as undercutting the will of California voters, who overwhelmingly supported weeding politics out of the redistricting process, bank on Newsom casting the campaign as a referendum on Trump and his devious effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress. Newsom employed a similar strategy when he demolished the Republican-led recall campaign against him in 2021, which the governor portrayed as a 'life and death' battle against 'Trumpism' and far-right anti-vaccine and antiabortion activists. Among California's Democratic-heavy electorate, that message proved to be extremely effective. 'Wake up, America,' Newsom said Thursday at a Los Angeles rally launching the campaign for the redistricting measure. 'Wake up to what Donald Trump is doing. Wake up to his assault. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people.' Kevin Liao, a Democratic strategist who has worked on national and statewide campaigns, said his D.C. and California-based political group chats had been blowing up in recent days with texts about the moment Newsom was creating for himself. Much of Liao's group chat fodder has involved the output of Newsom's digital team, which has elevated trolling to an art form on its official @GovPressOffice account on the social media site X. The missives have largely mimicked the president's own social media patois, with hyperbole, petty insults and a heavy reliance on the 'caps lock' key. 'DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER 'HOT.' FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS 'STEP,' ' one of the posts read last week, dutifully reposted by the governor himself. Some messages have also ended with Newsom's initials (a riff on Trump's signature 'DJT' signoff) and sprinkled in key Trumpian callbacks, like the phrase 'Liberation Day,' or a doctored Time Magazine cover with Newsom's smiling mien. The account has garnered 150,000 new followers since the beginning of the month. Shortly after Trump took office in January, Newsom walked a fine line between criticizing the president and his policies and being more diplomatic, especially after the California wildfires — in hopes of appealing to any semblance of compassion and presidential responsibility Trump possessed. Newsom had spent the first months of the new administration trying to reshape the California-vs.-Trump narrative that dominated the president's first term and move away from his party's prior 'resistance' brand. Those conciliatory overtures coincided with Newsom's embrace of a more ecumenical posture, hosting MAGA leaders on his podcast and taking a position on transgender athletes' participation in women's sports that contradicted the Democratic orthodoxy. Newsom insisted that he engaged in those conversations to better understand political views that diverged from his own, especially after Trump's victory in November. However, there was the unmistakable whiff of an ambitious politician trying to broaden his national appeal by inching away from his reputation as a West Coast liberal. Newsom's reluctance to readopt the Trump resistance mantle ended after the president sent California National Guard troops into Los Angeles amid immigration sweeps and ensuing protests in June. Those actions revealed Trump's unchecked vindictiveness and abject lack of morals and honor, Newsom said. Of late, Newsom has defended the juvenile tone of his press aides' posts mocking Trump's own all-caps screeds, and questioned why critics would excoriate his parody and not the president's own unhinged social media utterances. 'If you've got issues with what I'm putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president,' Newsom said last week. 'So to the extent it's gotten some attention, I'm pleased.' In an attention-deficit economy where standing out is half the battle, the posts sparkle with unapologetic swagger. And they make clear that Newsom is in on the joke. 'To a certain set of folks who operated under the old rules, this could be seen as, 'Wow, this is really outlandish.' But I think they are making the calculation that Democrats want folks that are going to play under this new set of rules that Trump has established,' Liao said. At a moment when the Democratic party is still occupied with post-defeat recriminations and what's-next vision boarding, Newsom has emerged from the bog with something resembling a plan. And he's betting the house on his deep-blue state's willingness to fight fire with fire. Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Laura Nelson contributed to this report.
