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THE CLEAR INTENT of Alabama's viciously xenophobic immigration law - and the likely effect, now that most of it was upheld by a federal judge this week - is to hound, harass and intimidate illegal immigrants into uprooting their lives and moving elsewhere. The law aims to do this by various means, but none is more pernicious than a provision requiring the state's public schools to collect information on every student's immigration status, starting in kindergarten and going to 12th grade.

Headlines from Alabama tell us that the latest "education reform" there is making sure we know exactly how much the state is spending to educate the children of "illegal" immigrants. According to a new law, parents are required to present documentation when registering their children to attend school. While the law does not require school officials to turn in the names of "illegals," it has sparked widespread fear among immigrant parents, and many have withdrawn their children from school. Meanwhile, Texas governor Rick Perry's poll numbers in the Republican primary have fallen after he said that members of his party who do not support free education for students who are undocumented "have no heart."

Law officers and lawmakers in some states want schools to help spot illegal immigrants. Federal authorities remind school officials that every child is entitled to an education. National education groups echo that but recommend that schools avoid getting involved when it comes to students' citizenship issues.

Daniela Pelaez is valedictorian of her class at North Miami Senior High, in the international baccalaureate program with a 6.7 GPA, applying to Ivy League universities, and hopes to become a heart surgeon. "Over my dead body will this child be deported," said Miami-Dade Superintendant of Schools Alberto Carvalho, who exited North Miami High Friday morning holding the 18-year-old's hand. The pair joined a walkout protest planned by fellow students after a judge denied Pelaez' request for a green card Monday and issued a deportation order. Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement have said they will not move on her case until Pelaez' appeal is completed, her plight roused her North Miami High friends to take action -- including making a petition already signed by nearly 5,000 people and staging the protest.

When they vote on their legislative agenda on Tuesday, New York State's top education officials will focus for the first time on the contentious topic of illegal immigration.

"The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being made responsible for a school's low academic performance is a recent phenomenon. Historically, policy elites and educators explained poor academic performance of groups and individual students by pointing to ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, immigrants' cultures, family deficits, and students' lack of effort. School leaders would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Until the past quarter-century, demography as destiny was the dominant explanation for unequal school outcomes. Things began to change by the mid-1970s."

If it weren't tucked into a forest more than 4,000 miles from Wisconsin, Vesala Comprehensive School could stand in for a public school in Milwaukee. The industrial-looking building from the 1960s serves 365 students, most of whom live in nearby public housing projects. More than half come from single-parent households, and 70% are low-income. Twenty-two percent qualify for special-education services. About 30% are immigrants or students who speak a first language other than the official languages of Finnish and Swedish. But unlike in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, where the achievement level of a school can generally be predicted by its ZIP code and student poverty rate, Vesala is part of a national system where the performance gap between the lowest and highest achieving students is one of the narrowest among developed countries, according to a respected international exam.

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum - a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan's experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

On the one hand you've got billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, pouring money into reshaping public education into whatever model they think best-and because they're billionaires, they must know best about everything, right? On the other hand you've got the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), spreading toxic, corporate-authored model legislation around the states to push for anti-immigrant laws, voter disenfranchisement laws, anti-sick leave laws and more. Except, wait. This isn't an on the one hand, on the other hand situation-they're the same hand, spreading the influence of the very wealthy not just in what politicians get elected, but what laws get passed. And Bill Gates' foundation is honoring that shared goal with a $376,635 grant to ALEC

In response to the question, 'Are teachers activists?' my answer is: No. Not inherently. Teaching brown kids math, helping recent immigrants master English, or even making an occupational commitment to public education, are none of them inherently radical acts, though they are often characterized as such. This is not to say that choosing education as a profession is in dissonance with struggling for social justice. It is when we believe that it is enough-that simply being a teacher by trade is activism-that we enter into dangerous territory. For this belief is complicit with a plethora of assumptions detrimental to justice, including the notion that learning is inevitably about competition, class mobility and community escape.

The general Finnish educational method is a Dewey-esque learning-then-doing approach, theory then practice model. Teachers are highly professional and professionalized. You need a Master's degree to teach at a higher level than kindergarten. There is great respect for teacher judgment as well as respect and decent wages for teachers as the best people to determine what metrics best account for learning success. They work with principals at coming up with the best ways to determine how to measure success, engage kids and communities, and how to both keep national norms and address local conditions. In immigrant communities, kids are taught all subjects in their first language (including Finnish instruction).

Harlem Renaissance High School is a place of last resort. It is filled with kids just out of jail, teenage mothers, immigrants who can barely speak English, special ed students and bright kids who have given up on themselves. They are clinging to the bottom rung of the public education system, and there aren't many places for them to fall. Now their school is fighting for survival, too.

"It's widely agreed that American education is in trouble.  What is missed in both the response to the crisis and the cacophony of reform efforts is a true understanding of the nature of the problem. In the early days of public schooling, Horace Mann called the schools the balance wheel of society. It was thought that schools served as a corrective for all kinds of problems ranging from skill gaps that needed to be remedied for the economy to flourish to culture gaps that were created by immigrants that needed to be Americanized. The school never worked in quite that way, but it was part of a web of social institutions that helped build a framework that allowed America to grow both in prosperity and in diversity. We face a lot of social and economic problems; we expect the schools to solve them. When they don't, we think it's a school failure. Instead, the schools are in fact a signal of a breakdown. Nowadays, the balance wheel is not working so well; it would be more accurate to think of public schools as the canary in the mine."

How do you get people who hate each other learn to resolve their differences democratically? How do you get them to believe in ballots not bullets? What if the answer is "public schools" and the evidence for it is in our own history during the first half of the twentieth century? In the years spanning about 1890-1930, two institutions-public schools and the foreign language press-helped generate this trust among the massive wave of eastern and southern European immigrants who came to the U.S. during that time. This is not a traditional "melting pot" story but rather an examination of a dynamic educational process.

"This report shows that segregation has increased seriously across the country for Latino students, who are attending more intensely segregated and impoverished schools than they have for generations.  The segregation increases have been the most dramatic in the West. The typical Latino student in the region attends a school where less than a quarter of their classmates are white; nearly two-thirds are other Latinos; and two-thirds are poor. California, New York and Texas, all states that have been profoundly altered by immigration trends over the last half-century, are among the most segregated states for Latino students along multiple dimensions."

When Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice test in 1914, he was addressing a national crisis. The ranks of students attending secondary school had swollen from 200,000 in 1890 to more than 1.5 millionas immigrants streamed onto American shores, and as new laws made two years of high school compulsory for everyone and not simply a desirable option for the college bound. World War I added to the problem, creating a teacher shortage with men fighting abroad and women working in factories at home.

Our educational system, historically a major engine for equal opportunity and a pathway to the American Dream, is under severe stress. Along with it, the working- and middle-class and immigrant dream of rising out of economic anxiety is evaporating, as our public education system, from preschools through public universities, has lost broad support. This is evidenced by declining state commitments to public education-relative to health-care and prison expenditure-by property-tax caps in communities and states that affect the quality of schools, and by expenditure cuts rather than tax increases at the federal level of the kind we just witnessed in the debt-ceiling agreements. We make decisions and deals like these at our peril.