by James A. Bacon

Based on an analysis of 2019 data, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 250,000 “unauthorized” immigrants reside in Virginia. Two out of five (39%) of these unauthorized residents have children. These children attend Virginia schools.

It’s often difficult to measure the impact of illegal immigration on American society, but the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) collects statistics that give us a sense of the challenge faced by Virginia’s public school system. According to VDOE data, 137,000 students were classified as “English Learners” in the 2023-24 school year, while another 46,000 were described as “former” English Learners. Whether or not they came to the U.S. legally is impossible to discern from VDOE data, but given the influx of illegal border crossings in recent years, it is likely that a significant percentage is “unauthorized.”

Here is one inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from the VDOE enrollment database: The number of English Learners in Virginia public schools has tripled over the past 20 years. The number surged from 60,000 in the 2003-04 school year to 137,000 in 2023-24, as seen in the graph above and detailed in the table below.

One in nine students in Virginia public schools today is an English Learner.

The vast majority are Hispanic, although the number of Asians is significant. Most Black English Learners originate from Africa and Haiti. We know from other data that only a tiny fraction of the “White” students come from Europe. Middle Easterners and North Africans are counted in the U.S. Census classification system as White, so it is likely that most students classified as White have immigrated from the Middle East.

Various questions arise from these numbers. One is what it costs to educate these children. Is the skyrocketing number of illegal immigrants a cost driver in K-12 schools? If so, what burden does that create for taxpayers?

Another question, more interesting to my mind, is what happens to these kids once they enter the school system. How do they fare? Do they languish in poverty and failure? Or do they assimilate and adapt?

It goes without saying that, all other things being equal, a student who is not fluent in English will have a more difficult time mastering classroom material than will a student who is. Not unexpectedly, a large educational achievement gap shows up in the Standards of Learning test statewide results for 2023-24.

English Learners struggle across the board, scoring “pass proficient” (the basic pass rate) at rates one-half to one-third of their native-born peers. It is reasonable to wonder how this gap might be closed. Is the solution to expend greater resources — hire more English as a Second Language teachers, for instance — or should the responsibility fall to some degree upon the students themselves? Do immigrant youth pick up English on their own and does their academic performance improve over time?

I cannot answer that question without a more in-depth analysis than I can provide in this blog post, but I’ll provide a clue by with a close-up of Virginia’s largest school district, Fairfax County, where spending averaged $18,800 per student last year, far above the statewide average.

As can be seen by comparing tables, Fairfax County English Learners scored roughly the same in 2023-24 as their statewide counterparts in Reading, Math and Science, but they performed even more dismally in writing and history. Fewer than one in 10 passed their writing exams! Clearly, there is more to the story here than adequacy of resources. A deeper analysis would delve into the performance of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic sub-groups as well as standards and expectations that prevail in Fairfax County and other school districts.

What can we learn by looking at racial/ethnic differences? This table shows the gap between economically disadvantaged and advantaged students (essentially, those on free school lunch plans and those who are not) broken down by racial/ethnic category.

Clearly, economic status is a critical variable. Among Hispanic students, who account for more than two-thirds of all English Learners, Not Disadvantaged students passed their English reading test at almost three times the rate of their Economically Disadvantaged fellows. There were wide gaps as well among Whites and Asians, with the smallest differential found among disadvantaged Blacks.

It would be interesting to look at one more variable from a statewide perspective before closing this post. What happens to former English Learners? How well do they fare once they are deemed fluent in the language? (See the detailed guidelines for assessing English language proficiency here.) Unfortunately, VDOE’s database does not break out former-English Learners as a separate category; it lumps them in with all English Learners. But it is evident that the academic achievement of ex-ELs improves dramatically. Adding this group bumps up the overall performance of ELs in Reading from a 32.3% pass rate to 48.7% pass rate.

It would be worthwhile to crunch the numbers to tease out the performance of ex-English Learners to see how they compare to their U.S.-born peers. It would be a good measure of how upwardly mobile these immigrants are academically, which is a foretoken of how upwardly mobile they will be economically.

The massive influx of English Learner immigrants into Virginia puts a strain on the public education system — more than $1 billion just in state funding — and depresses average SOL scores. But we may need to credit the system with helping propel tens of thousands of English Learners into the ranks of English-fluent students who may perform as well as their U.S.-born classmates (as low a bar as that may be). Who knows, perhaps immigrant children out-perform their classmates once they master English. We’ll examine the numbers in a future post.

Update: The Virginia Mercury published an article focusing on what happens to unaccompanied minors when they arrive in the country. The Mercury reports that 33,800 children have been released into a sponsor’s care in Virginia alone. Another challenge faced by these children is a high rate of absenteeism. Many get discouraged by their inability to keep up with school work; some take jobs to generate income.