Daily Archives: 21 August 2013

Immigration and Border Security

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The Senate’s bill on immigration reform purports to include a requirement for border security that must be met before a citizenship path for existing illegal aliens can begin.

Regardless of what we might think about the strength of that requirement, it demands data on current and trigger border security levels.  Those data may not be available:

[CRS and GAO] reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service show the Department of Homeland Security lacks an accurate barometer to measure the success of ramped-up efforts to curtail illegal crossings.
…
…[they have the] number of apprehensions of people coming in illegally….  But those numbers…don’t necessarily show whether an increase or decrease is due to immigration trends, economic shifts, enforcement policies or all of the above.

Because

Apprehensions data…exclude two important groups when it comes to unauthorized migration: aliens who successfully enter and remain in the United States…and aliens who are deterred from entering the United States[.]

That these data are hard to collect (the deterrence factor may be impossible to assess) in no way increases the reliability of apprehensions as a measure of security.

The GAO’s beef also includes a lack of data availability for the several immigration-involved agencies that would benefit from them: “a lack of interagency coordination and information sharing” and “inconsistency in data collection.”

This is just one more example of the lack of reliability of what this government tells us, and in this case it has—or should have—a direct impact on this government’s ability to achieve immigration reform, which is badly needed in any event.

A (State) Government Proposal

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…behind which I could get (sorry.  My mother was an English teacher of the old school, and knuckle raps are hard to forget).

Tennessee has decided not to consider student performance only when assessing teacher compensation; they’ve decided to use student performance also in determining whether teachers will be allowed to continue to teach.  Last week they decided to

pull the license of teachers whose students consistently fail to improve.

“This is not about taking away teacher licenses, but about making sure our students have the best classroom teachers,” said Kevin Huffman, the state’s education commissioner.

The move also is proactive: the policy requires teachers to show they are boosting student achievement rather than requiring the state to show they are not.  If the teachers cannot demonstrate student improvement—if the teachers cannot demonstrate actual performance—they would lose their teaching licenses.  This places the burden of proof is where it belongs, a good innovation.

The teachers union in Tennessee, the Tennessee Education Association, claims not to oppose holding its members to performance standards, but….

[T]he current plan gives too much weight to the state’s measure of student growth, which she described as “complicated and problematic.”

Here’s the groundwork being laid for the excuse generation wave as the standards are begun to be upheld, which will begin with the 2015 school year.

How strongly will the union actually oppose this move?  With the excuses already starting, the union attitude will be problematical.  We’ll see in the realization, though, how strongly the unions are invested in student performance as opposed to perks for the teachers—and for union leadership.