The report also finds that of those immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 2000s, more of them had bachelor’s degrees than those without high school degrees, a reversal from the previous decade, when new immigrants were more likely to be without high school diplomas than to have college degrees.

According to Brookings, a plurality of the 100 largest metropolitan areas has significantly more college-educated immigrants than immigrants without high school degrees, and that college-educated immigrants are more likely to be either unemployed or overqualified for their jobs. The Washington Post quotes Steven Camarota of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies who claims that, based on the report’s findings, “we’ve got an oversupply of highly skilled workers” in the United States. But some additional context to the report’s findings shows why this might be a mistake.

Firstly, the report undercounts unauthorized immigrants; the findings are based on the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which as the report points out is estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to be 10 to 20 percent off when it comes to including the undocumented in its calculations. Furthermore, the report also points out that the percentage of immigrants without high school diplomas still exceeds that of native-born workers with diplomas, and the percentage of native-born with college degrees still slightly exceeds that of immigrants with college degrees. This means the U.S. government’s immigration policies still ultimately favor college-educated natives over college-educated immigrants.

An acknowledged weakness in the report’s findings is its reliance on possessing bachelor’s degrees as the defining feature of a “high-skilled” immigrant. A bachelor’s degree is not necessarily a good measure of whether a prospective immigrant possesses the skills necessary to be useful to an employer whose needs are not being met by the native labor market. A recent Migration Policy Institute report (PDF) makes a clear distinction between merely “skilled” workers (“college graduates and other workers who fill primarily entry-level, white-collar jobs”) and “highly skilled” workers (“professionals and advanced degree holders who enhance the human capital pool and help to address mismatches between the supply of and demand for skills”). The latter usually have graduate degrees or advanced technical experience not captured by merely counting the number of immigrants with bachelor’s degrees.

By lumping both skilled and high-skilled categories together, the report fails to specifically address the high demand for workers with particular specializations and graduate-level degrees, frequently mentioned at the MPI panel The American Independent reported on earlier this week. The evidence suggests not an oversupply of skilled workers, but rather an immigration system that is incapable of fine-tuning its visa system based on the particular needs of the economy.

Pundits have long argued, writes the Education Equality Project, that the most important element of school reform involves making sure all students have access to good teachers:

“The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from,’’ says President Obama. “It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have-it’s who their teacher is.” Without “the right people standing in front of the classroom,” the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution concludes, “school reform is a futile exercise.”

And yet, according to the Education Equality Project, studies show that districts routinely put the least-qualified teachers in front of the most needy students:

How wide is the teacher effectiveness gap in high-poverty schools? A recent study in Los Angeles of 9,400 math classrooms in grades 3-5 found that students in the district’s poorest schools were nearly three times as likely to have teachers from the bottom quarter of teachers (measured by teacher effectiveness in raising math achievement) than students in the district’s most affluent schools. At the same time, the Los Angeles study shows that effective teachers have a profound impact on student learning. On average, students assigned a teacher in the top quartile increased their math achievement scores 10 percentile points more than students who had a teacher in the bottom quartile—a huge one-year gain.

In New York, writes Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times, unions finally agreed to  make it easier to remove bad teachers from classrooms in 2005:

During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.

The transfer rules were ended in 2005, under an agreement between the city and the teachers’ union.

But New York is hardly a model of reform. Freedman goes on to explain that now New York teachers   accused of wrongdoing end up in the city’s infamous “rubber rooms,” where teachers are paid to show up for weeks, months, or even years while their cases are arbitrated in a seemingly endless process.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education

In an interview with The Colorado Independent, Van Schoales, urban education officer for the Piton Foundation, points out that Colorado–which is currently writing its Race to the Top application–could certainly choose  to cease the practice of shunting inadequate, unqualified teaches to low-income schools.

But Schoales also pointed to a federal requirement that states have as many school districts as possible—and their superintendents, board presidents and union presidents—sign on to the state’s application. He worried that such a strict buy-in requirement will push the state to leave controversial proposals about what to do about inadequate teachers out of its application.

According to the Times editorial, Duncan is not the first to fail to require districts to reform this practice. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 also originally aimed to stop the practice of sending unqualified teachers to the most challenging schools. But then the Bush administration backpedaled.

The country would be much further along on the reform trail had the Bush administration followed the law. Instead, it allowed the states to define away the problem by re-labeling the existing, inadequate teacher corps as “highly qualified.”

The U.S. Congress tried again to keep unqualified teachers out of high-needs schools when it passed the stimulus act, writes the Times. But Congress, too, backpedaled, eventually couching the issue in “euphemistic language that asks the states to describe in vague terms whether the teacher corps is “highly qualified.”

The Times argues that this time around a timid White House is hoping to save the controversial issue until next year—and deal with it as part of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

This week, the Brookings Institute set up the Mountain West Initiative, its largest domestic satellite at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. There, visiting scholars will rotate through, developing policy for the region.

The problem with the Intermountain West, says the Institute, is that local and state leaders—far from D.C.’s hallowed halls—don’t fully understand how to work together to assert the Intermountain States’ causes in the nation’s Capitol. And Washington isn’t paying attention on its own.

According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the most radical demographic, land-use and economic transformations in the nation are currently occurring in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah

“The region is growing up, flexing its muscles and distancing itself from California, which has historically had an outsized impact on the West’s development,” wrote the Institute last fall.

The Mountain West Initiative is particularly interested in a new kind of urban place in the Southwest that it calls “megapolitan areas”—“vast, newly recognized ‘super regions’ that often combine two or more metropolitan areas into a single huge economic, social and urban system.”

Basically, if you live in the Front Range—where Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs are all linked along the I-25 corridor—you live in one of these pioneering new urban spaces.

The work of the Mountain West Initiative will be guided by a report issued by the Institute last summer: Mountain Megas: America’s Newest Metropolitan Places and a Federal Partnership to Help Them Prosper. The report suggests that while mountain states have become increasingly popular places to live and work, they need to do a better job of working together and with the federal government to harness and guide that growth in ways that are sustainable, productive and inclusive.

Namely, it suggests the states:

-Develop a better surface and air transportation network–including international connections.

-Drive innovation in the region by improving research at state universities and developing strategic industry clusters.

-Provide better education to all citizens, particularly immigrants.

-Craft well-designed urban spaces—in many cases, by undoing the legacy of auto-influenced development.

For more Colorado-specific suggestions from the Brookings Institute, read this section of the report.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.