California's Education Systems Face Critical Choices at All Levels
Students from Immigrant Families Particularly Affected
As California recovers from a severe budget crisis that hit immigrant students particularly hard, policymakers and education leaders face critical choices with respect to financing, implementation of new academic standards and future directions for the state’s high school, post-secondary and adult education systems. These decisions hold significant implications for the education success and future workforce skills of California’s large and growing population of immigrant and Latino youth, the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy concludes in a new report.
Home to one-quarter of the nation’s immigrants and more than one-third of U.S. students who are English language learners (ELLs), California’s success in integrating immigrants and the children of immigrants into post-secondary education and the workforce is critical not just for the state’s competitiveness but that of the nation as well. More than half of California youth ages 16 to 26 are immigrants or the children of immigrants — compared to one-quarter nationwide — and the state accounts for nearly 30 percent of unauthorized immigrant youth eligible for relief from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, if they meet educational and other criteria.
“Coming out of a historic recession, California’s education systems are at a watershed, with enormous changes underway affecting funding, governance, standards and accountability at all levels,” said report co-author Sarah Hooker, an MPI policy analyst. “The state’s responses to the recession undercut its performance in educating immigrant youth; whether this record improves will remain in doubt unless the needs of these youth are made a more central focus of reform and accountability efforts.”
The report, Critical Choices in Post-Recession California: Investing in the Educational and Career Success of Immigrant Youth, traces the deep budget cuts that resulted in the loss of 32,000 teachers in the K-12 system, a decline in community college enrollment of nearly 500,000 students and a collapse in funding for adult basic education (as much as 60 percent of state funding for adult ed was redirected to other purposes in 2011-12).
The cuts, some of which the state has begun to reverse, came against the backdrop of major existing education challenges: California ranks 46th nationally in Education Research Report: California's Education Systems Face Critical Choices at All Levels: