Education funding solution: tuition for foreigners

Dave Mundy - I have a solution (at least a partial one) to Texas’ educational funding problem. Rosetta Stone Store It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s rational. Charge tuition for foreign nationals attending Texas public schools.? The cost of public education in Texas has nearly doubled since 1995, when the Texas Education Agency was first tasked with publishing statewide educational statistics. We could send a kid to school to be educated for a year for $4,504 in 1995, with $2,637 of that cost spent directly on instruction.? In 2010, that cost had risen to $8,572. The difference? Some 210,000 more educational staff statewide (99,000 teachers) to handle 1.2 million more students — and a sharp rise in the number of students whose first language is not English.? The percentage of Texas students who are listed by the TEA as being “Hispanic” has risen from 36 percent in 1995 to 49 percent last year; the number of African-American students has stayed at the same 14 percent ratio, while the number of white students has plummeted from 47 percent to 33 percent.? In the meantime, the number of students enrolled in special education has tailed off from a high of 12 percent to just nine percent last year, while the number of students requiring bilingual education or English as a Second Language has risen to 16 percent — that’s around Rosetta Stone Cheap one in six students.? Texas has always had a strong Hispanic influence; it’s part and parcel of our unique culture. For many of us, learning the Spanish language was part of going to school — it was required in the Deer Park ISD where I grew up, for example.? But never in Texas history have there been so many “Texas citizens” who can’t speak English — mainly due to the fact that most of those whose first language is Spanish aren’t citizens, aren’t trying to become citizens and aren’t the least bit interested in American citizenship. They’re just here for the freebies, including free schooling.? It’s time they paid their fair share.? There are those who maintain that many of these non-English-speaking drains on the public treasury are “citizens” deserving of the “right” to a “free public education.”?? The prevailing argument is that the 14th Amendment automatically grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. That interpretation is false: using that argument, children of foreign diplomats, for example, are American citizens whether they want to be or not.? The fact is, many of these so-called “citizens” are the products of fraud perpetrated against the American taxpayer — “anchor babies” born to illegal immigrants who cross the border just before giving birth. They use this fraud to circumvent the right of the American people to control their national borders.? Children of illegal aliens are also illegal aliens, whether they were born on the U.S. side of the border or not. And they are a drain on the resources of the American taxpayers.Texas school districts have been told that they cannot reject students based on citizenship status. But nothing says that a simple change in state Rosetta Stone Greek V3 law can’t accomplish what needs to be accomplished — finding a way to offset the massive cost of educating foreign nationals who are in our country unlawfully.? The federal government has already amply demonstrated that it will not live up to its constitutional obligation to protect our national borders. So here’s a solution available at the state level to the problem of foreign invaders bankrupting us.? First, we require all parents enrolling students in public school to show a picture ID to demonstrate their citizenship. That’s not a “racial” thing: everyone has to do it. Those who cannot supply information indicating they are U.S. citizens or lawful foreign nationals are classified as “unapproved resident foreign nationals” and subject to tuition costs.? The tuition I propose to charge is one-half of what the statewide total instructional expenditure was the previous year; thus, this year’s tuition based on 2010 numbers would be $2,488 per student. This tuition would be paid directly to the local school district Steelers Jerseys charged with educating those unlawful foreign nationals.? That still leaves us well short of the total expenditure on each pupil, of course. The remainder of that cost — again, using 2010 figures, that number would be $6,084 per kid — would be charged to the home country of the identified foreign nationals.? So if, say, a hundred thousand of Texas’ 4.8 million public school students were identified as being here unlawfully from, for example, Canada then Texas sends Canada a bill for $608.4 million to educate its citizens currently residing illegally within our borders.? It makes sense, it partially solves our education funding problems and it forces countries which are intentionally flooding Texas with their “unwanted” citizens to reconsider their policies.? Unfortunately, Texas lawmakers have proven time and time again over the years that they’re not willing to do what is necessary to solve public education issues.? When Texans told them they wanted more local control over education back in 1995, for example, State Sen. Bill Ratliff re-wrote the state’s education code to instead hand more power to local and regional administrators while requiring training in “consensus-building” for local school boards to stifle possible dissent.? Evidence has been introduced over and over again that the Texas Education Agency lied to the public about everything from test scores and dropout rates to accepting funding for Soviet-style “school-to-work” programs, but our legislators have never once stepped up to the plate and done their job and held that agency accountable.