Post Bulletin, Oct. 30
ACT scores tell the truth about Minnesota schools
The rejection - some might say abject failure - of the national No Child Left Behind Act in 2015 reaffirmed the authority of individual states to set their own goals and standards for student achievement.
Fair enough. Education isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor, and what works at an inner-city school in New Orleans won’t necessary succeed in an upscale Seattle suburb or a small town in Appalachia. States and individual school districts decide what’s best for their students and what standards those students must meet to advance and graduate.
But students who wish to go on to college must clear another, far less subjective hurdle - the ACT or SAT exam. In a world where truth has become slippery and every fact seems to have an alternative, the questions on these college entrance exams have right answers and wrong answers. Any measurement of a state’s and/or community’s success in educating its children must consider their performance on these standardized tests.
Minnesota is doing very, very well.
Of the 19 states where at least 90 percent of 2018’s high school graduates took the ACT, Minnesota ranks No. 1 with an average score of 21.3 out of 36.
To fully grasp how good that score is, consider the average score in Iowa, another perennial ACT powerhouse with a strong reputation for its public schools system. In the Hawkeye State, the average ACT score for last spring’s graduates was 21.8. That’s higher than Minnesota’s average score, but just barely - and only 68 percent of Iowa’s graduates took the exam.
In Minnesota, 99 percent of graduates took the ACT. Districts statewide administer the exam free of charge in students’ junior year as part of the state’s regular battery of standardized tests, so almost everyone takes it, including students who don’t plan to attend a four-year college or university.
So, to put the matter in sports terms, Iowa squeaked out a victory by playing only its high-scoring players, while Minnesota played everyone on its roster, including students who have learning disabilities, live below the poverty line or speak English as a second language.
We can think of no better proof that Minnesota has one of the nation’s best educational systems.
Granted, it would be easier and cheaper to let kids opt out of the ACT, but we applaud the policy of having all students take a national exam in math, language and science. For some students, this test is a much-needed reality check, a notice that they have work to do before they set foot on a college campus. On the other hand, we suspect that some students are pleasantly surprised when they receive their scores. Kids surrounded by high-achieving peers can underestimate their own abilities until they see hard data that says, “You’re smart, too!”
Speaking of smart, 10 as-yet-unidentified Rochester students earned perfect scores of 36 on the ACT exam in the past 12 months, and the average score for the district’s students was 22.3, well above the state and national averages.
Those numbers tell us that great things are happening in our schools - and we can state with full confidence that those numbers don’t lie.
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The Free Press of Mankato, Nov. 1
Citizenship: Presidents don’t get to decide
Why it matters: President Trump said this week he will abolish birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution.
It’s bad enough that an American president claims the right to unilaterally override a constitutional amendment, as Donald Trump did this week in pledging to abolish birthright citizenship.
It will be worse if Trump’s intent, voiced in an interview released Tuesday by Axios, is seriously attempted - and worse yet if his partisan colleagues in Congress meekly acquiesce in such an unconstitutional maneuver.
The 14th Amendment - one of the Reconstruction Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War - opens with an unambiguous sentence: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. (The exception clause refers to the children of foreign diplomats, who have legal immunity from U.S. laws.)
This sentence overrode the Dred Scott decision, that blot on American history and jurisprudence in which the Supreme Court declared that blacks have “no rights that the white man was obliged to respect.”
Trump, as is his wont, lies about the subject, claiming that the United States is unique in granting citizenship to all born in its territory. The truth is that 33 nations, mostly in the western hemisphere, follow the practice.
The president is far from the only Republican who dislikes birthright citizenship, but the likes of Sens. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell have always recognized that changing it requires a constitutional amendment. Trump now claims that not only is an amendment unnecessary, he doesn’t need Congress to act either.
This is several bridges too far.
Republican tolerance of this dangerous nonsense undermines their oft-stated claim of insisting on strict judicial interpretation of the Constitution. To redefine the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment by executive fiat would be precisely the opposite. It should not be attempted, and if attempted should not be tolerated.
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Minneapolis Star Tribune, Nov. 2
The new war on birthright citizenship
The Constitution’s guarantee is part of the greatness of America.
President Donald Trump, in his zeal to continue his crackdown on immigrants, has resurrected an old, mostly fringe argument: that the United States should no longer guarantee citizenship to those born on American soil. It is a notion rooted in fear and antithetical to the very Constitution he swore to uphold.
The 14th Amendment is an eloquent, uplifting statement on what it means to be an American. It offers equal protection under the law not just to citizens but to all who reside here. It clarifies - in ways the original Constitution did not - who can be an American citizen: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
For 150 years, that has been the constitutional promise of this country, that those lucky enough to be born here would be Americans from their first breath. The notion arose out of the searing divisions left by the Civil War, when some states were determined to withhold citizenship from the children of slaves. Those 1868 authors could have crafted an amendment that extended citizenship to slaves alone. Certainly such arguments were advanced at the time. Instead, the authors went much further.
Anthony Winer, a constitutional law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, calls the 14th Amendment “one of the most consequential and transformative amendments we have.” According to Winer and the vast majority of legal scholars, the clause that Trump and some others are pinning their hopes on, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” is widely understood as applying to the children of foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers - not immigrants, regardless of legal status.
Trump may be dismayed that James C. Ho, whom he recently elevated to the vaunted Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C., is among those legal experts. A conservative constitutional scholar who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ho offered an eloquent and detailed defense of the amendment in 2011, saying that “the text of the Citizenship Clause plainly guarantees birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of all persons subject to U.S. sovereign authority and laws.” Ho said that “the sweeping language” of the 1898 high court decision in U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark, which turned on this issue of citizenship, “reaches all aliens regardless of immigration status.”
Winer said the understanding of that clause is so widely held that he is dubious that any attorney or expert of standing would tell Trump that he could alter the Constitution by executive order alone. In any reasonable administration, the attorney general would advise the president how unlikely he would be to prevail. A Congress that stood for something besides fealty to the president would defend the Constitution. At least outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan came out against the proposal, saying, “You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order .? We didn’t like it when (President) Obama tried changing immigration laws via executive action and obviously as conservatives we believe in the Constitution.”
Sadly, these are not normal times. Americans can hope - but they should not trust - that these institutions would contain the president’s worst policy instincts. Ryan is on his way out. In the Senate, Republican Lindsay Graham of South Carolina is eager to carry a birthright bill for Trump.
It’s possible that Trump’s plan is simply a last-ditch election ploy to rile his base. But Trump has talked about revoking birthright citizenship for years - including in 2015, when he was still a long-shot candidate. Were it to succeed, the proposal would alter something foundational in this country, and not for the better. It would create a permanent underclass of those born here but barred from claiming an American birthright.
In a land of immigrants, that would be shameful.
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