What Is It About Public Schools?

NPR: “Tennessee could become the first state to require proof of immigration status to enroll in public schools.”@WilliamLamberth & @SenBoWatson’s cruel push to block undocumented kids from schools and turn schools into ICE informants making national news.

(Their aim is to… pic.twitter.com/OLNMlaNTxK

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) March 21, 2026

As far as I can tell, this one started in Tennessee. 

“School vouchers” is definitely a national phenomenon, started and continued by right wing cranks determined to extirpate Brown v Board root and branch (what’s left of it) and take us back to 1953. The basic idea is to leave people worse off than they are now, by promising them the false hope that private is better than public.

The best private schools in Houston are already refusing to take vouchers. Religious schools are allowed to take vouchers, but Muslim schools had to sue to be allowed to take them. Children with disabilities are eligible for vouchers, but need extra paperwork to prove they qualify for extra money for private schools, who don’t already get federal funding for educating such students. The public schools now have the burden of providing that paperwork. But the private schools still get to select which students can enroll.

The dream of people enrolling their children in “better” private schools is proving a pipe dream; a lead pipe upside the head, delivered with brute force. Private schools don’t provide transportation; require expenses like school uniforms; and often are so demanding students need tutors just to keep up. Vouchers won’t pay for that. And there’s the social status issue: the kids whose families are paying for school, will look down on the voucher kids, if only because of the wealth disparity. It’s a nightmare scenario, with one goal in mind.

And now, there’s a movement to overturn Plyler v Doe, as well. 

[Stephen] Miller met with Texas Republicans for more than four hours and demanded to know why the GOP-dominated legislature had not passed a bill to restrict public school funding to children who are citizens or are “lawfully present in the United States," which would break a precedent set in 1982 by a ruling in Plyler v. Doe that found states must pay for elementary school education for children regardless of their immigration status.

“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson said. “He challenged us, and he encouraged us, and he asked us to partner with him."

Miller's proposal, if passed into state law, would cut education funding for an estimated 100,000 students out of more than 5.5 million schoolchildren in the state, the Times reported. It appears to be intended as a model for other red states to follow, according to the report.

"[It seems to be an effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state," said state Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat and the chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Plyler v Doe is a 1982 ruling that the 14th amendment means what it says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That last phrase is the key: “nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” The state of Texas denied access to public education to the children of “illegal immigrants,” even though those persons pay school taxes (property taxes; Texas has no state income tax). The Supreme Court said, quite clearly, the state was in violation of the 14th Amendment.

Stephen Miller & Co. don’t like that conclusion, because they don’t think non-white people are… “persons.”

This argument is of a piece with the challenge to birthright citizenship. The basic argument is that only certain people (white) can be citizens, and further, only citizens are entitled to equal protection of the laws, the plain language of the 14th be damned. So we need school vouchers to get the white kids away from the non-white kids (and separate the abled from the “disabled”), and the worthy whites from the unworthy (vouchers help some people, but offer false hope to others without quite enough money). We need to cement the deal by cutting off non-persons from our public schools, thus cutting expenses there and making vouchers even more viable. 

They want, in short, three classes of people: citizens who are worthy, evidenced by wealth; citizens who are less worthy, but we need plumbers and laborers, right? And an immigrant class who are non-citizens, and unworthy of any legal protection, the better to make them “self-deport.”

This is what you voted for, America. Amid oil prices and inflation and falling job rates, are you paying attention?

“The winners are at war with the losers, and the fix is in. The prospects for peace are awful.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., fifty years ago or so.

The more things change….