Dallas Morning News’ Numbers On Illegal Immigrants In Texas Schools Appear Grossly Inflated, Flawed

This weekend, the Dallas Morning News published a report claiming that as many as 400,000 students in Texas public schools could be in the U.S. illegally, costing as much as $3.5 million per year.

While the Morning News admits this number is toward the top end of the spectrum, it is nonetheless what every other news organization, including UPI, is taking away from the story.

The problem? The numbers and the costs the Morning News touts at the outset of its article seem nowhere near accurate.

Although it was given only a passing mention in the paper’s article and in the charts comparing the Morning News’ work to other reports, the Texas Comptroller’s Office has previously issued an extensive report that places a different number and a different cost on the number of illegal immigrants in Texas public schools. Although the Comptroller’s report was done at the end of Carole Strayhorn’s tenure in 2006, its numbers should still be reasonably accurate as public school population peaked at 4.95 million students in Texas in 2006-07 according to the Texas Almanac.

Here is a takeaway from the Comptroller’s report:

The Comptroller’s office estimates that there were about 135,000 undocumented children in Texas public schools during the 2004-05 school year, or about 3 percent of total public school enrollment. Dr. Jeffery Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that there were 140,000 undocumented students in Texas public and private schools in 2001-02.[11] Applying the eight percent growth in total student enrollment from 2001-02 to 2004-05 school year (fiscal 2005) to the estimated 140,000 undocumented students resulted in an estimated 151,182 students in 2004-2005. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report’s estimates that 89.3 percent of Texas students are enrolled in public school. That was applied to the estimated number of undocumented children in school, resulting in an estimated 135,013 undocumented students in Texas public schools.[12]

The Texas Education Agency reports that, during 2004-05, the average state and local expenditure per student was $7,085 (this excludes federal funds). Applying this figure to the estimated number of undocumented immigrant children in public schools, the Comptroller estimates that the cost of educating undocumented children in 2004-05 was slightly less than $957 million (Exhibit 3).

Compare that to the Dallas Morning News:

•At the top end, the analysis provides a solid ceiling. State records show 92 percent of the state’s schoolchildren have Social Security numbers on file, indicating they are legally in the United States. That means Texas cannot have more than 8 percent – about 400,000 illegal immigrant students – or spend more than $3.5 billion annually to educate them.

Clearly, there are some problems with the Dallas Morning News’ analysis.

Since the Dallas Morning News didn’t “show their work” as you would with a math problem, it is difficult to dissect their numbers, but it is necessary to attempt to do so in order to show that they are problematic.

There are several sets of numbers the DMN could have selected from. They could have picked total spending per pupil, or total instructional spending per pupil, with the latter number being lower ($8,350 and $4,993 per student respectively as of 2008–these stats are from the DOE’s National Center for Education Statistics, as the newly redesigned Texas Education Agency website doesn’t appear to have current information for Texas anywhere).

If they used the latter number, you get about $3.34 million, less than the “over $3.5 million” figure cited by the Morning News. Given that per pupil spending has probably increased, it is fair to say, using the Morning News’ estimate of 400,000 undocumented students, that the number could approach or exceed $3.5 million.

However, the number of undocumented students the Morning News uses as its “high end estimate” seems to be ridiculous and have been concocted using a method that evidently no other group studying the problem has used–whether or not a child enrolled in school has a social security number.

The dead giveaway should be that the Texas Comptroller’s Office did not use this to come up with their population estimates in 2006.

The Comptroller’s Office–while notoriously hellishly political with revenue estimates–isn’t typically as political with reports like this, and that office based its population estimate off of a Pew Hispanic Center study done a year or so prior to the release of the 2006 report. Pew derives its numbers from U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor statistics.

Neither did FAIR, a notoriously anti-illegal immigrant group, in a prior study it did cited both by the Comptroller’s study and the Dallas Morning News. Even their numbers are lower than the DMN’s:

The lowest estimate, by the comptroller’s office, was 125,000 students for the 2000-01 school year. The highest was 225,000 for 2003-04, by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-illegal-immigrant group that has issued several reports about the strain that it says immigrants place on the public education system.

In its latest estimate, for 2009, FAIR drastically reduced the number of illegal immigrant students in Texas public schools to 127,390, nearly 100,000 less than its 2003-04 estimate.

Part of the reason for the lower number, explained Jack Martin, FAIR’s director of special projects, is because the flow of new immigrants to the U.S. has slowed in recent years, while illegal immigrants who are already here continue to have children.

That raises a separate, but related issue: U.S.-born children – therefore, U.S. citizens – of illegal immigrants. In Texas, the Pew Center’s Passel estimated, there were 350,000 U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants in grades K-12 in 2009, more than twice as many students as those who were illegal immigrants themselves.

In using the Social Security Number data from TEA, the Morning News admits that the data is “little known,” (although the Comptroller’s Office no doubt is aware of it), and admits that it is potentially flawed because there are thousands of Texas students who are in the country legally but are immigrants and the children of foreign workers and thus without SSNs and, because some parents simply fail to (accidentally or deliberately) provide schools with the data. Add to that the fact that some districts do not even change their databases to reflect an SSN if one is provided and you have a recipe for unreliability.

So, if the data is unreliable (and it is no doubt far more unreliable than even the Dallas Morning News is willing to admit given that students aren’t required to provide a social security number and there are likely data collection errors made by districts across the state), why use it–and why put it so near the lead and why even consider it a “top line” number when notoriously anti-immigrant groups will not even agree that the number is reasonable?

It is a good question. One can only assume that it is an attempt by the Morning News to provide additional fodder for the anti-illegal immigrant debate that will paly out in the Texas Legislature this session and, quite irresponsibly, give people like State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler) more fodder to push their hateful, rhetoric-filled, anti-immigrant legislation.

The bad thing about this article is that people–policy makers, lawmakers, and average citizens–are now able to say (while citing the Dallas Morning News as their source) that Texas could have as many as 400,000 illegal immigrants on the public school rolls.

In an environment rife with anti-illegal sentiment at a time when the Texas Legislature is dominated by far-right Republicans demanding drastic action, this is yellow journalism at its finest and wholly irresponsible on the part of the Dallas Morning News.

The paper should have never cited 400,000 as a ceiling because the data upon which those figures are based are so unreliable that not even the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts used them. The data may be “little known,” but you can bet that the Texas Comptroller knew about them, analyzed them, and deemed them to be unreliable when compiling its 2006 report.

This is yet another example of poor journalism done by a declining paper placing such a premium on “enterprise reporting” that it is actually willing to allow such garbage to pass an editorial fact check.