Federal officials may be reluctant to wade into the nation’s hot-button immigration debate, but the American Educational Research Association did not hesitate at its recent annual meeting here to declare its opposition to Arizona’s controversial new immigration law.
Leaders of the group convened a news conference at which they not only announced the adoption of a resolution to refrain from holding events in Arizona, but also said they would encourage members to conduct and disseminate research on the new law’s ill effects on children and education.
In doing so, they themselves crossed a frontier, between their commitment to promoting solid research and their urge to take public stands on issues.
That they felt a burning need to air their position was evident by the timing of their news conference, hastily called at an hour that pre-empted media coverage of what had been billed as one of their meeting’s premier events, a session featuring a high-level Chinese education official and a top adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. That they felt torn between the group’s legal obligation to be politically neutral and their own desire to be anything but became apparent as the conference quickly escalated from a briefing on the resolution into a forum for association leaders and members—and even visiting Arizona high-school students—to speak out against the immigration measure.
Signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, and set to take effect around the end of July, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 calls for state and local police officers to demand proof of legal immigration status of people whom they suspect of being undocumented aliens. The governor has pledged that the law will not lead to racial profiling, and the state’s House of Representatives has voted to amend it to bar authorities from investigating people based solely on suspicion of being in the United States illegally. Nevertheless, the measure has been widely criticized as inviting racial profiling, and leaders of the education-research association concluded that the governor’s assurances and the House amendment do not alleviate such concerns.
Narrowly Focused Resolution
The association’s resolution, adopted by every member of its governing council except one, who abstained, says the group “will no longer hold meetings or conferences in the state of Arizona until such time as this law is rescinded or AERA otherwise revisits the issue.” It argues that the new law “is so broad in its reach and enforcement powers that it can have an adverse impact on the freedom to travel or assemble without encroachment.”
At the news conference, Kris D. Gutiérrez, who was the group’s president-elect at the time, said the governing council adopted the measure under an organizational bylaw letting it take the safety and security of members into account in defining the appropriate conditions for its meetings. The group has no plans to hold its annual conference in Arizona anytime soon. But it routinely holds smaller gatherings there and was concerned, she said, that its Hispanic or international members might be stopped or detained by the police.
The resolution’s narrow focus on member safety, and its omission of any broader statement on immigration policy, stemmed from the association’s inability as a nonprofit group to legally take a formal stand on political matters. The resolution turned out, however, to be just a portion of the message the group delivered to reporters. Ms. Gutiérrez, who wore a sign saying “I could be illegal,” said the group plans to use its resources to disseminate research on the negative effects of the law, which she sees as likely to impede researchers’ efforts to study immigrants who will be fearful of identifying themselves as such.
Felice J. Levine, the association’s executive director, said that the Arizona measure lacked any grounding in empirical research and that the group’s leaders felt obliged to oppose it, given its potential impact on education researchers and their work.
Patricia Gándara, a member who is a professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles and co-director of the Civil Rights Project there, said, “We are very concerned that Arizona is turning into the new apartheid South.” She said the group also worried that the state law would derail international education efforts, especially those involving the United States and Mexico, and would make immigrant families in Arizona fearful to send their children to school.
Political Inclinations
This was hardly the first time the education-research group has taken a public stand on a divisive issue. Most notably, when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed the legality of the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policies, in 2003, the association’s leadership declared in a friend-of-the-court brief and at a news conference that studies had shown that diversity promotes educational benefits, and that “percent plans” and other alternatives to race-conscious admissions were ineffective. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor invoked the AERA brief in the majority decision upholding race-conscious admissions.
But in the years since then, many researchers who support such policies have retreated from the limb the group went out on. They now acknowledge that diversity offers educational benefits only in certain carefully managed settings, and that heavy-handed admissions preferences actually can cause damage. And many studies of percent plans have offered fairly positive assessments of their effects.
The association’s political inclinations are no big secret. Its conference here featured 136 sessions on social justice, 96 on diversity, 52 on critical race theory, and 28 on feminist theory, At such events, as a rule, amens far outnumber expressions of doubt. The group holds sessions on some educational policies favored by conservatives or libertarians, such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers, but the papers presented there are far likelier to be critical or skeptical in tone.
At a discussion of the future of education research held at this year’s conference, Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade, co-director of the Educational Equity Initiative at San Francisco State University’s Cesar Chavez Institute, voiced concern that the sessions’ echo-chamber dynamic results in people’s not being asked the hard questions that would lead to stronger research with more appeal to practicing educators.
‘Everyone Has an Agenda’
Few of the association members camped out here at the Denver Convention Center had serious qualms about the group’s stand on the Arizona measure. Apart from their general opposition to the law, their reasons for being unconcerned varied.
Deborah A. Harmon, director of Eastern Michigan University’s Office of Urban Education and Educational Equity, expressed confidence that education researchers are trained to put aside their feeling and bring objectivity to their work. “That is what makes us professionals,” she said. Many others, however, argued that researchers can never be neutral or objective and should not pretend to be. “A lot of us come from the orientation that everything is going to be political anyway, and everyone has an agenda,” said Benji Chang, who had just finished his doctoral studies at UCLA.
Even if the members mobilized by the leadership can be objective in their specific studies of Arizona, the association’s agenda appears likely to influence the questions they ask. It is hard, for example, to imagine them scrambling to study whether educational performance will improve at schools that no longer find themselves overwhelmed by influxes of the children of undocumented immigrants.
The conservative backlash against the association’s position has already begun. Chester E. Finn, Jr., a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said in an e-mail message that the stated concerns of Ms. Levine, the executive director, about the lack of social science underpinning the Arizona measure is “her way of pretending that the organization’s boycott has something to do with its mission, which it obviously does not and ends up making her, and the organization, look like fools.”
Frederick M. Hess, director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an association member, said the news conference on the Arizona law was “not even smart politics.”
“Education researchers,” he said, “are frustrated that they are not accorded as much respect as some other research communities, but I think they undercut their own case when they baldly politicize the role of research.”
It is entirely possible that good researchers will produce solid studies showing that the Arizona law is a bad mistake. But, thanks to the AERA news conference, they might find it harder to be believed.
