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By Adam Echelman | CalMatters
As President Donald Trump ramps up immigration enforcement, targeting immigrants at workplaces and street corners across California, his administration is turning its attention to adult students.
In a memo earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education said adult students without legal status must be banned from federally funded career technical education classes, English-language programs and high school equivalency courses. Adult schools offer these courses to anyone over 18 years old, including immigrants, and many school leaders say the new policy could lead to enrollment declines. California’s K-12 districts may also need to adapt since they use federal funding to offer numerous career technical education classes that teach skills such as welding and farming.
The new policy poses administrative challenges for these schools, which don’t require students to prove their legal status. Many students, including U.S. citizens, lack the proper verification documents.
“It’s going to perpetuate this atmosphere of fear,” said Randy Tillery, the director of economic mobility for the nonprofit WestEd, which helps collect data on behalf of the state.
Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the state is suing over the new policy.
The U.S. Education Department refused to comment on the new policy. In a press release, the department said it will enforce it starting Aug. 9.
Adult schools ask students to voluntarily share their Social Security numbers, which are only available for those with a legal right to work in the U.S. Of the more than 500,000 adult learners taking classes in California, about 10% voluntarily share their numbers with their schools, Tillery said.
Schools across the state say that they are waiting for more guidance from state and federal agencies before barring students from any classes.
‘What if you don’t return?’
V., a student at Huntington Beach Adult School, has been taking a beginner-level English-language class for the past two years, in-person, Monday through Thursday, for two and a half hours a day. V. agreed to be interviewed on the condition that CalMatters not identify her because she doesn’t have legal status and fears deportation.
Her three children, who are U.S. citizens, couldn’t stand the idea of their mom going to school this summer as the threat of immigration raids loomed. “When I grabbed my backpack to go to school, my kids said, ‘Don’t go, mom. What if you don’t return?’” she told CalMatters in Spanish, her voice shaky, on the verge of tears.
Last month, she sent a note to her teacher, saying that, because of “uncontrollable anxiety” she needed to take the class online. “I was, I am and I continue to be terrified to leave (my house),” she said later.
Normally her class has about 40 students, but this summer, it’s down to 24, according to her teacher. The class is livestreamed, and an increasing number of students are opting to take the course online, the teacher said. CalMatters is withholding the teacher’s name to ensure V.’s anonymity.
It was harder to focus while taking online classes, V. said — her kids often interrupted the livestream or something on the computer distracted her. After about two weeks of online school, V. returned to class in person, despite her kids’ fears.
Steve Curiel, the principal, said the school is allowing students without legal status to attend, at least for now, until the education department provides more guidance about its new policy.
For a month now, adult schools have been managing uncertainty over federal policy and funding. Federal funding for adult schools typically comes through on a yearly basis, with the fiscal year beginning July 1, and it provides as much as 30% of a school’s budget. The education department withheld the money for a month, leading California Attorney General Rob Bonta to sue Education Secretary Linda McMahon. On Friday, the department said it would begin releasing the money this week, but the lawsuit is still ongoing, according to Elissa Perez, a spokesperson for Bonta’s office.
“We’re feeling optimistic but we’re still holding our breath a little bit because we want to see the actual release of the funds,” said Curiel. He was about to begin making cuts on Friday to contracts at Huntington Adult School but said he will now hold off.
“It’s going to perpetuate this atmosphere of fear.” – Randy Tillery, director of economic development at WestEd
Many states rely entirely on the federal government to fund English-language learning and high school equivalency programs for adults, whereas California has a financial cushion: The state provides over $650 million each year specifically for adult education, representing the bulk of funding for California’s adult schools.
Turning teens away from classes
The education department’s new policy on adults without legal status could also affect high school students. Although much of the federal funding in question supports adults taking English classes and high school equivalency courses, career technical education is part of a separate pot of money, known as Perkins funds, and includes hundreds of high schools across the state. The education department memo says that funding for those programs should be restricted to students who are legal residents or citizens.
An estimated 150,000 children between the ages of 3 and 17 live in California but lack legal status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The vast majority are enrolled in school.
The U.S. Supreme Court case Plyer v. Doe requires K-12 school districts to provide all students, regardless of their legal status, with “a basic public education,” but in the memo, the U.S. education department said that career technical classes are no longer considered part of a “basic” education. The memo also says that children without legal status are now prohibited from taking college-level courses in high school.
To implement the education department’s new policy, public K-12 schools would need to tell certain students that they can’t take specific classes because of their legal status. It would create “an enormous problem for schools,” said Tillery, since schools don’t ask students about their legal status. Public schools would need to gather data about who is a legal resident and who isn’t, he said, which could deter some students from attending school at all.
The U.S. Education Department did not respond to CalMatters’ questions asking how schools should respond or what enforcement might look like. The Los Angeles Unified School District said it was “awaiting further guidance” from the state’s education department, which also declined to comment.
For V., the English classes are about her family more than anything, she said repeatedly. Her daughter is about to be 11 years old and prefers to speak English over Spanish, though she has a speech impediment and struggles to communicate in either language. V. said she wants to be able to speak more English with her daughter, hoping it might help, despite the risks of going to class.
“We’re not living our own lives,” said V. “We’re living for our children.”
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Arresting willing adult and teen students, especially those who are working to acclimatize to a new language, is about as counter-productive as it gets for elevating people’s productivity, upping the GNP (a country’s gross national product, a measure of a country’s economic health), preventing crime and improving general health.
It would be GREAT if we could educate, housing, medicate, feed and otherwise aid the entire world population who can make it here… WE DO NOT HAVE THE FUNDS OR RESOURCES… I know that is a hard concept to understand.
But…We DO have the resources. We’re just allocating them almost all to megabillionaires.
The above comment is typical of lazy-minded, all-or-nothing, hyper-polarized thinking, very common among politicians, pundits and their simpleminded imitators. NO ONE is talking about “the entire world population”, and using this level of hyperbole is disingenuous, trolling, mental pollution. We’re not talking about housing, medicine, and food, but education and cost/benefit ratio of supporting adults (although Trump’s bill also negatively affects children in public high schools, and will probably be struck down in courts because of it) who WANT TO LEARN things to improve their life. Improving one’s life generally makes one happier and more productive, and we are obviously a healthier and stronger society when more people improve their life through education. Is that a hard concept to understand?
COAST – we absolutely have the resources, people like you just choose not to use them for people in need or education. Stop voting for criminals who brag about sexually assaulting women and possibly children and it would be start!
Every concept is hard for you to understand, which is why you write simplistic nonsense like that.
Exactly. Bravo 🙌
Another of our regular bigots.
It’s worse to educate them. They will not contribute as much as they could to the country’s welfare and are much more likely to fall into property crime or substance abuse. The tax breaks given to the very, very rich would go a long way to making this possible. Look at what the kids of immigrant Irish, Italian, Jews accomplished when they came here in droves.
A correction of a typo in the first sentence is in order?!
We do though, have the funds and resources, to take care of everyone who is currently here.
Depends how much you want to take away from things like schools (and no I’m not talking adult Ed I’m talking K-12), infrastructure, etc. These are things we are absolutely struggling at in CA especially. Priorities….
Yes, the con priority is to reduce education levels across the board, to secure more people in their chosen demographic.
So you’re saying the Republican voters are the dumb ones. Keep with that political angle. It’s working so well for you!
The Dems appear to be all for handouts for anyone and everyone who wants free stuff in exchange for some votes. Ehhh….
You just proved who’s ignorant – you and those like you.
Yep. Not only dumb, but also selfish and ultimately willing collaborators with evil.
BASIC – “So you’re saying the Republican voters are the dumb ones.”
Absolutely what everyone is saying and what voting statistics and other social metrics confirm. In general, you’re all much less educated. Hey, don’t be sad. It shows. Own it.
Just another example of overkill, cutting off our nose to spite our face. These classes help our fellow citizens and our neighbors. Self improvement and education benefits everyone. The Trump administration is loaded with people who view anyone from another country as a criminal who deserves punishment and hardship without end. In other words their working philosophy is based in xenophobia and racism, and they’ve managed to convince plenty of Americans that we can’t support immigrants in their journey to become citizens, even though we’ve been doing it for decades. The tiny amount of money it takes to run a small English language class, or to teach people how to work a trade pays off exponentially to society at large for decades. This is simply mean-spirited and based on un-American values, along with economically stupid.
OK so, my grandparents were immigrants, and came here speaking languages nowhere even close to English, from cultures that in no way resembled anything found on the American continent. This was a long time ago; no housing, medical, educational, food, or other assistance…they just had to come here and hit the ground running.
On the good foot, they didn’t have all the crap that today’s immigrants have to deal with in order to be allowed in; they pretty much had to just get through Ellis Island, pass the medical exam, and they were good to go. Some of them ended up with their names Americanized, otherwise mangled, or a more acceptable middle name substituted for the “too ethnic” surnames that they arrived here with (this happened to my maternal grandfather), but if they were healthy, they were generally admitted.
My family was of course wildly guilty of “chain migration”, sending sons over here to get jobs, start businesses, save money, and bring other relatives over one by one to then do the same. They were dedicated to learning English, which they knew was the key to success; this was generally accomplished by meeting at someone’s store after business hours, in a church basement, or at someone’s house and getting the basics down that way, then practicing every chance they could. They raised their American-born children speaking English only in many cases, because they didn’t want their kids being seen as “less than”, or being taken advantage of, or as being viewed as “not real Americans”. Some, like my mother’s parents, spoke their native tongue at home in addition to English so their kids wouldn’t lose their language and culture entirely, but they were expected to excel in school which at that time was English only. In any event, on both sides of my family, this was the norm.
Nobody waved the flag more vigorously than these immigrants, honored to finally find themselves safe…if not welcomed…on American shores. No more massacres, genocides of all sorts, persecution for their ethnicity and religion. While it was far from easy here, it was a walk in the park compared to where these people came from…and what they went through to get here.
So, here’s the thing; it’s a clear and foregone conclusion that the MAGAts hate anyone who isn’t them. These people would sell out their own mothers if it enriched them in some way. They don’t give a damn about me, you, your mom and dad from wherever, your children…and they definitely don’t care if you earn under an arbitrary income level. Anything that they can take away, including your last bite of food….they will take it away and further enrich themselves. You and I cannot stop them from doing this at this time, and if we eventually do so, we MUST ensure that in the future, our country and its Constitution and the programs and services that we ALL depend upon in some way cannot EVER be snatched away by whatever megalomaniac is in power.
Meanwhile…a few of our Dad’s bits of pithy advice were these: If you take their money, you have to take their crap. Life is like a crap sandwich; the more bread you have, the less crap you have to eat. I am female and it was drummed into my psyche as strongly as it was into my brother’s; make your own way the best you can and NEVER depend on someone else’s generosity for your life, because people are fallible, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the day will probably come where that person tells you to do something or live in some way that you do not want to do or live like…and your cereal bowl will depend on you bowing down and doing as you’re told…or else. ALWAYS make sure that you can feed and shelter and clothe yourself. You may not be eating fancy dinners, living in a mansion, or wearing designer clothing, but what you have will be yours, worked for, bought, and paid for by your own hand. You won’t be selling out your freedom and your ethics for your survival.
So…my advice is for people to start gathering up their own power and whatever resources they can cobble together, and start taking care of their needs the best they can while we get through this mess together. Yes, it is going to be a bumpy ride…we’ve all become used to certain things…things that our taxes and our votes have ensured, but with the rich and powerful and cruel in charge, we’re all going to have to take care of ourselves and one another.
The fact that we live in a society now where the weakest, poorest, and most vulnerable are under attack is nothing short of criminal, but this is where we are…for now. Let us marshal our considerable resources, serve one another the best we can, and gather together what we need to ensure this never happens again.