Public schools cannot discriminate against nor force undocumented families to pay tuition due to a 1982 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case known as Plyler v. Doe.
In a 5-4 decision, the court held that schools are responsible for extending the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to undocumented children, and that public schools could not request citizenship documentation of students nor deprive children of an education.
“By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation,” wrote Justice William Joseph Brennan Jr. in the majority decision.
Yet in the decades since the ruling, state legislators and even school districts have occasionally attempted to challenge the decision by denying enrollment to students or mounting legislative efforts to collect citizenship status information from students and families.
Calls from conservative lawmakers and organizations to overturn the decision have been renewed this year and are projected to continue under the incoming second presidential administration of Donald Trump.
While the precise future of federal protections on undocumented students’ access to free public education remains unclear for now, this explainer looks into how the Plyler decision came about and the arguments for and against overturning it.
What was the Plyler v. Doe case about?
In 1975, the Texas legislature passed a bill allowing public school districts to deny admission or charge tuition to undocumented children. As a result, in 1977, the Tyler Independent School District charged $1,000 per year to each child enrolled who did not provide proof of legal immigration status.
Attorneys with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of four families whose children were affected by the Tyler district’s decision.
These families paid property and sales taxes, thus contributing to funding for public education as any other local taxpayer, said Chloe Latham Sikes, deputy director of policy at the Intercultural Development Research Association, or IDRA, a Texas-based nonprofit whose members provided expert testimony in the Plyler case.
The families claimed the $1,000 tuition charge was exorbitant.
The case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme court in 1982, when a majority of justices ruled the Texas legislation unconstitutional.
“The court ruled there is not an unreasonable burden for the state to pay for the funding for these students to be educated in public schools,” Sikes said.
The Tyler district is now the largest school district in northeast Texas, serving more than 18,000 students. About 75 percent of them are from economically disadvantaged families, and Hispanic students are the largest ethnic group, accounting for about 48 percent of all students. Of course, because of the Plyler precedent, it’s unknown how many students in the district are undocumented.
What are the arguments for overturning the Plyler decision?
Attempts to circumvent the Plyler decision began shortly after the ruling and have continued.
California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994, barring schools from admitting any student without legal status and requiring schools to notify federal immigration authorities of any student thought to be in the country in violation of immigration laws. The measure was later struck down in a federal court because it was in violation of the Plyler decision.
In 2006, an Illinois school district denied enrollment to a student who had overstayed his tourist visa. The district ultimately allowed the student to enroll after the Illinois State Board of Education threatened to withhold funding.
And in 2011, Alabama lawmakers enacted a measure requiring school administrators to collect and report to state education officials the immigration status of newly enrolling students. The provision was permanently blocked in October 2013 when the state agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit, according to the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Many of the arguments in favor of overturning the landmark decision focus on costs associated with educating growing numbers of undocumented students, including the costs of English-language instruction.
In a report published in February, researchers at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, calculated that the growth in enrollment of unaccompanied minors in Arizona, California, New York, and Texas in federal fiscal year 2023 “may have cost taxpayers almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.”
The report recommended that states “require school districts to collect enrollment data by immigration status as part of their regular enrollment counts” to better calculate the costs associated with educating undocumented students, and to “pass legislation that requires public schools to charge tuition for unaccompanied migrant children,” including charging tuition for students from undocumented families.
Such actions and legislation would directly go against the Plyler precedent, something the Heritage researchers recognized.
“Such legislation would draw a lawsuit from the Left, which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision that had no basis in law,” the report reads.
The Heritage Foundation did not make anyone available for an interview to discuss the legal strategy.
Republican state lawmakers in some places have taken steps consistent with Heritage’s recommendations.
Earlier this year, Utah Republican Rep. Trevor Lee expressed interest in barring undocumented students’ access to the state’s public schools, suggesting that the nation’s highest court should revisit Plyler v. Doe. He initially proposed a constitutional amendment to bar immigrant children without permanent legal status from enrolling in public schools, but he later converted it to a resolution calling for federal action on immigration, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
And this fall, school districts in Oklahoma pushed back against calls from state Superintendent Ryan Walters to calculate “the cost and burden” of serving undocumented students. Walters has been mentioned as a potential pick to serve in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration as secretary of education.
Efforts to overturn the Plyler decision echo broader efforts by Republican lawmakers to exclude immigrant families and children from a variety of public services, Sikes said.
In August, for instance, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order requiring hospitals to collect information on the costs associated with providing medical care to undocumented immigrants.
Abbott has also called for the federal government to cover the costs of educating undocumented students, and has called the Plyler decision unconstitutional.
What are the arguments defending the Plyler decision?
Advocacy groups and educators in favor of preserving the Plyler decision point to the belief that everyone in the United States has a constitutional right to a free public education regardless of immigration status and that such a right is a net gain for everyone.
“Public education is a massive public service that we have historically determined is a public good, and that was kind of the basis and logic of the Supreme Court in 1982 with the final decision,” Sikes said. “This is about our democracy. This is about how we live together. This is about creating an educated society where everyone can contribute.”
When it comes to arguments about the costs associated with educating undocumented immigrants, advocates such as Sikes point out that undocumented immigrants pay taxes that fund public education.
In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, with about $37.3 billion paid to state and local governments, according to calculations by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a tax policy think tank. State and local governments are responsible for the lion’s share of public school funding.
Researchers also estimated that California, New York, and Texas were among six states that raised more than $1 billion each in tax revenue from undocumented immigrants living within their borders.
“It’s really important to understand that over the past 40 years, the United States has seen successive waves of migration, whether it was Haitian refugees coming to Florida in the 1990s, Cuban refugees, people coming from Central America, people fleeing instability and violence over many periods of time. And communities have, throughout this entire period, been able to step up and provide this education,” said Will Dempster, vice president of strategic communications for the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant advocacy organization based in Los Angeles.
And while many English learners who require additional English-language development support on top of access to grade-level content are immigrants, most English learners were born in the United States, according to federal data.
On the topic of collecting immigration status information from students and their families, Sikes argues that teachers and administrators should not serve as immigration enforcement officials given the complexity of immigration law and the variety of legal statuses members of the same family can possess, including various specialized visas. While it’s helpful for schools to know what services and support families need, Sikes said it is inappropriate for schools to collect precise information on students’ immigration status.
What is likely to happen to Plyler?
The future of the Plyler v. Doe decision remains unclear.
For now, it’s the reigning legal precedent. But policy and legal experts are watching state legislatures closely for any pending actions that could lead to the highest court revisiting the case.
“We’re in a moment where we should know when our state leaders and rising federal folks in leadership say they want to do something, they do mean it, and we should be vigilant about how that might look and how that would really be detrimental to our families, our communities, and children across the United States,” Sikes said.
