Maine Schools are Failing While More Educational Resources are Devoted to Illegal Aliens
February 21, 2025
A new report shows academic performance in Maine’s public schools is tanking. At the same time, Maine’s illegal alien population is rising as a result of expanding sanctuary policies. It’s an inverse relationship that deserves some honest examination. Unfortunately, given that most public officials, educators, and members of the media in Maine support sanctuary policies, they have little interest in exploring, let alone acknowledging that any nexus might exist between mass immigration and classroom quality. Nor is there much discussion of how taxpayer funds used to support illegal aliens in the sanctuary-urban areas of the state could be used instead to enhance education more broadly in the rest of the state.
In the down category, new data released by the National Center for Education Statistics reveals that Maine students in 2024 had the lowest test scores in three decades in both reading and math. Just 33 percent of Maine fourth-graders are proficient in math — one of the lowest levels in the nation — while only 26 percent of fourth-grade students are reading at grade level. Eighth-graders fared no better with only 25 percent of them proficient in math and 26 percent proficient in reading. As a result, Maine students now rank 38th in the country.
In the up category, immigration – much of it illegal — is surging especially in the state’s population clusters of Portland and surrounding Cumberland County. Due to sanctuary policies in these communities, the area has attracted thousands of illegal aliens and their children — mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. As a result, 70 percent of the students enrolling in the Portland school district in 2023 had limited English skills (versus ten years earlier when 70 percent of students entering the district had advanced English proficiency). Across the school district, 57 languages are now spoken which impose monumental classroom challenges. One former school official admitted, “Every teacher needs to know how to teach students who speak other languages…as we continued to welcome in so many new students it felt like we were at a tipping point.”
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2025/02/21/maine-schools-are-failing-while-more-educational-resources-are-devoted-illegal
