Today is the day that tiny children under the age of five, separated from their families at our southern border, were supposed to have been reunited with their families. But the records are all messed up. And the confusion and dysfunction extend beyond our “advanced” nation’s incapacity to reunite children and parents. There are also serious problems with the education children are said to be receiving while in detention.
In an editorial on Sunday, the Washington Post comments on a shocking report from the NY Times, that federal officials somehow deleted computer records and ID numbers which connected children to the families from whom they have been separated: “A jaw-dropping report in the New York Times detailed how officials at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection deleted records that would have enabled officials to connect parents with the children that had been removed from them. No apparent malice impelled their decision; rather, it was an act of administrative convenience, or incompetence, that led them to believe that, since parents and children were separated, they should be assigned separate case file numbers with nothing to connect them. The result is Third World-style government dysfunction that combines the original sin of an unspeakably cruel policy with the follow-on ineptitude of uncoordinated agencies unable to foresee the predictable consequences of their decisions….”
The Trump administration’s hastily imposed policies to detain parents and separate them from their children were imposed for the purpose of frightening immigrants away from our borders through the threat of separation itself. Apparently officials in the Justice Department didn’t think about putting any kind of infrastructure in place to protect the rights of children or their parents after they were separated.
Neither was there advance planning to provide for the children what our law requires—education while in detention. In Saturday’s NY Times, Dana Goldstein reported on the education programs in many of the shelters she has investigated: “Federal law requires that all children on American soil receive a free public education, regardless of their immigration status. As the Trump administration expands the number of people detained at the border, shelters and detention facilities are ramping up their roles as makeshift schools, teaching English and civics classes, offering cooking lessons and setting up field trips to art museums. But according to lawyers and educators with firsthand knowledge of the child detention system, the education offered inside the facilities is uneven and, for some children, starkly inadequate…. (T)here are more than 100 facilities across the country where migrant children are detained—some run by nonprofits such as Southwest Key, others by private prison companies and government agencies—and the overall quality of the education they provide largely remains a mystery because much of what happens in the shelters is rarely seen by the public.”
Goldstein describes an ICE facility in Pennsylvania with classes divided into two levels: a class for children age 2-11 and a more advanced class for children ages 12-18. Developmentally that seems a radical redefinition of a one-room school. And, Goldstein adds, a number of the teachers are not fluent in Spanish; much of the class consists of worksheets or computer-driven instruction; and the curriculum is two-weeks long, which means that students detained for many weeks cycle through the same material over and over. Many of the schools in shelters employ teachers who are not certified to teach English language skills.
The problem is not merely incompetence and poor planning. In a largely hidden and unregulated network of institutions contracting for federal reimbursement, the temptation looms that someone will figure out how to profit. In a recent report for the Education Opportunity Network, Jeff Bryant examines one supposed nonprofit that has entered a growing “shelter” sector, Southwest Key, the operator of the shelter we have all read about in the closed Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. Bryant traces the connection of Southwest Key to a chain of charter schools and the for-profit companies that provide services to its charter schools: “Southwest Key indeed operates a charter business called East Austin College Prep which shares the same Austin street address. Other ‘related organizations’ appearing on the same 2016-17 IRS filings include Southwest Key Maintenance, which received $113,000 for ‘janitorial services,’ and Cafe Del Sol, which received $336,000 for ‘food services.’ The school paid Southwest Key Programs, $1.14 million for ‘administration and rent.'”
Bryant explains: “It’s a cozy relationship among an operator of youth detention centers receiving federal funds and grants, ‘public ‘ charter schools funded by Texas taxpayers, a ‘nonprofit’ organization providing a lease agreement and administration services to the charters, and for-profit entities servicing the schools. And the fact the schools, which overwhelmingly enroll Hispanic Students, are connected to a booming business separating Hispanic students from their parents and detaining them in facilities at the border raises legitimate questions and concerns….”
He continues: “Southwest Key is also expanding its charter school business… and the detention center enterprise is poised to work hand in hand with its expanding school network… The charter operation, which recently rebranded under management of Promesa Public Schools, is approved to expand to new campuses for the fall semester of 2018 in Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where Southwest operates four immigrant shelters including Case Padre, the detention center in the old Walmart store. According to Dallas News, leaders from Promesa and Southwest Key have approached officials, who oversee education of school aged children in Brownsville and the surrounding county, with a proposal to use the new Brownsville charter school’s resources and new campus ‘to serve about 1,000 kids being housed in the nonprofit’s shelters.'”
It is possible, of course, that Promesa Charter Schools will be models for educating detained immigrant youths, but with so little oversight, there is neither a way to protect the public’s investment nor the children’s rights. Our U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is noted for disdaining systems and lifting up the needs of “individual” kids. What she forgets is that the role of government oversight and public systems is to ensure the provision of services to meet the needs of individual kids and to protect their rights along with the investment by the public.
Remember instead the Washington Post editorial board’s warning about what we’ve got right now on the southern border: “Third World-style government dysfunction that combines the original sin of an unspeakably cruel policy with the follow-on ineptitude of uncoordinated agencies unable to foresee the predictable consequences of their decisions.”
janresseger 