Are the Costs of Serving Immigrant and Migrant Students Different in Rural Districts? If so, How and Why?

Abstract

Are existing cost adjustments built into aid formulas sufficient to enable districts to handle a stable flow of new students who are English-language learners but not sufficient to provide the finances needed to address a sudden influx? And does the reality that in rural districts these new students are the children of migrant workers, not the students of permanent immigrants, matter? Empirically, we explore these possibilities by seeing if there are added costs associated with higher shares of immigrants and migrants and if there are added costs only if the share of immigrants and migrants deviates from the baseline shares of immigrants and migrants in a district. In this context, migrants are children of seasonal workers most often associated with the agricultural workforce. We execute these analyses using the cost function methodology and supplementing Colorado administrative data with information from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data. While our estimates suggest that, all else equal, costs are higher in non-rural districts serving higher shares of immigrant students, we find that costs do not appear to be higher in rural districts serving higher shares of immigrant students. And there is no evidence that costs are higher in any districts when the immigrant share increases. Changes in the share of students who are migrants are related to district costs, but, somewhat surprisingly, we find that costs go down in non-rural districts when there is a year-to-year increase in the share of students who are migrants, while higher migrant shares do not appear to affect costs in rural districts, all else equal. We argue these results suggest that the immigrant cost crisis, particularly in rural districts, may be overblown when it comes to resourcing schools.