In an era when partisan echo chambers have produced polarized public discourse and a politically aligned unwillingness to entertain inconvenient facts, clear investigative journalism is among the highest forms of public service. It’s also increasingly rare, with many media outlets struggling to find their footing in an era of financial, political and technological instability.

More now than ever, we, the public, desperately need the facts about our collective challenges. It’s particularly urgent for K–12 schools, which have, of late, simultaneously faced less public oversight and more political pressure, hosting determined partisan efforts to distort the teaching of history and science. Truth is not in fashion in a country where motivated reasoning has become a core feature of mass politics.

That backdrop makes the recent investigation into schools’ enrollment rules for newcomer students by my 74 colleague Jo Napolitano especially valuable. In case you missed it — and if you did, click here — Jo called 630 U.S. schools posing as the aunt of a fictional 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant student named Hector Guerrero, and asked each how she could enroll him at the campus. Just 209 agreed to register him, even though he had a clear legal right to attend in most states based on his age — and still could have been admitted in the others.

It’s a valuable, revelatory piece of journalism that ought to prompt soul searching from educators and officials on the other 421 campuses, as well as districts around the country.

When a Scarcity Mindset Toward Immigrant Students Leads to Discrimination

Thanks to Jo’s work, it’s clear that one of our most persistent national misunderstandings around immigration and demographics holds firm sway in U.S. K–12 schools. Namely, too many Americans are stuck viewing immigration through a scarcity lens, as though the arrival of immigrants and their families somehow subtracts from resources and opportunities available to non-immigrants in the U.S.

Many school officials seemed to be translating that misunderstanding into enrollment decisions for Hector. Admitting him would be too difficult for their school, they warned. Hector might take up scarce resources or might cause their school’s graduation rate to drop, they fretted, further demonstrating schools' scarcity mindset toward immigrant students. And didn’t his family realize how hard English-only school might be for him?

When Napolitano pressed, some officials responded with civil rights violations masquerading as deterrents — sure, some said, Hector could maybe enroll, but he wouldn’t be placed in core academic classes or wouldn’t be permitted to participate in extracurriculars. Others were more actively dissuasive, asking about his citizenship status or hinting that he might need to pay tuition (both of these questions are irrelevant, bordering on illegal).

Read the full article about the scarcity mindset toward immigrant students by Conor P. Williams at The 74.