A 16-month-long investigation by education news outlet The 74 discovered a sobering truth: immigrant teens with a legal right to attend public school more often than not face refusal (not to mention prejudice and discrimination) when they try to enroll.

Lest you jump to conclusions about which public schools this occurs at or which states are most likely to deny immigrant students their legally-protected right to a public education, hang tight. Today’s gonna be a doozy.

An overview of the investigation

The 74 tested enrollment practices at over 600 high schools nationwide in all 50 states and Washington D.C. by “attempting to register a 19-year-old who spoke little English and whose education had been interrupted.” (More info on methodology can be found in this separate piece from The 74.)

More than 300, or nearly half, of the schools they called to attempt enrollment outright rejected the student. The vast majority of these rejections occurred in states where schools are legally required to admit students up to age 20. Here’s a quick number-crunch:

• The investigation reached out to 630 schools
• 209 agreed to enroll the student
• 330 refused outright
• 17 said they would probably accept
• 48 said they would probably reject
• 26 never responded at all

“State officials in almost all these locations separately confirmed to The 74 that a 19-year-old could not be turned away because of his age,” the piece noted. They ultimately found enrollment practices to be “arbitrary” and “unpredictable.” Interactions with school personnel were often “rife with bad information.” And schools that did allow the student to enroll tended to do so grudgingly or made clear the student would receive “disparate treatment,” which just so happens to be illegal under federal civil rights law.

The 74 concluded that they had revealed “pervasive hostility and suspicion toward these students in a particularly xenophobic era.” And all for the crime of attempting to get an education that by rights these students deserved.

Breaking down two common assumptions

I can hear certain assumptions sneaking into the peripheral vision of some readers. Maybe you’re thinking, “They must be talking about charter schools because traditional public schools would never deny students.” Or, “The schools that rejected the immigrant students must be in politically conservative states where anti-immigrant rhetoric is more pervasive.”

Wrong and wrong.

It appears the vast majority of the schools contacted for this investigation were traditional public schools (that should come as no surprise since they vastly outnumber public charter schools nationally).

But let’s zero in on just Indiana for the moment. The 74 reached out to 11 schools across the Hoosier state. Here’s the results, with enrollment outcomes at each school in parentheses:

• Indianapolis Metropolitan High School (accepted) and Lawrence North High School (probably reject) in Indianapolis
• Wayne High School (refused) and South Side High School (refused) in Fort Wayne
• Hammond Central High School (refused) in Hammond
• West Side Leadership Academy (probably reject) in Gary
• John Adams High School (refused) in South Bend
• Elkhart High School (refused) in Elkhart
• Concord High School (accepted) in Elkhart
• Goshen High School (probably reject) in Goshen
• Fairfield Junior-Senior High School (accepted) in Goshen

The only public charter school in that list is Indianapolis Metropolitan High School and they accepted the student. So the thing a lot of bad-faith charter school critics slam the sector over (denying a student who wants to attend and is legally guaranteed the right to a public education, which, by the way, is not actually a rampant reality at charter schools) is in fact something our traditional public schools are too often guilty of per this investigation.

Now let’s turn to the political assumption. The 74 found some pretty surprising things. For example, the student faced no refusals in staunchly Republican Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota, while Illinois offered almost no opportunity to the hypothetical student.

But perhaps what really matters is to look at Texas, Florida, California, and New York. After all, these four states combined enroll over half of the country’s Hispanic students. Across these four states, the student was turned away about two-thirds of the time.

California in particular offered a bleak picture. None of the 35 schools contacted there accepted the student. New York was much rosier, with 23 schools accepting and only 5 denying the student. Meanwhile, Florida and Texas were pretty mixed bags, with Texas in particular leaning slightly more toward rejection as the most common outcome. The takeaway? Statewide political leanings hold little bearing on the reality an older immigrant student faces when trying to enroll.

Futures in the palm of chance

There’s one other piece of the investigation I want to dwell on for a moment. Luck.

For starters, enrollment regulations pertaining to age vary wildly from state to state (it’s really one of those instances where a universal federal guideline seems more than appropriate). Moreover, it would seem few school employees responsible for enrollment know their state’s regulations. Consider: “While Hector was turned away from 204 schools where he had a right to attend according to his age, he was accepted at 31 schools where state statute would have allowed staffers to refuse him for that same reason.”

Perhaps worse, the investigation often found different staffers at the same school giving contradictory answers. Successful enrollment might just depend more on who picks up the phone than what your actual rights happen to be.

If education is the key to pursuit of the American Dream, it ought to be the easiest thing in the world to enroll in a public school. After all, the hard work we demand from students is supposed to happen in the classroom, not in getting there in the first place. That doing so isn’t easy or straightforward for a group of students is an indictment on our public education system nationwide.