On Wednesday, the Georgia state legislature passed a ban on undocumented students from attending five public colleges in the Peach State. The New York Times writes:
“Education officials in Georgia voted Wednesday to bar illegal immigrants from attending the state’s five most selective public colleges, a decision that immigrant rights groups threatened to challenge in court.
“Georgia is the second state, after South Carolina, to enact such a ban. The policy requires colleges to check the legal residency of all applicants and prohibits illegal immigrants from enrolling at any college with a selective admissions process. The ban takes effect next fall and applies to the University of Georgia, the Georgia Institute of Technology and three other colleges.
“The ban comes as lawmakers across the country grapple with whether illegal immigrants who attend high school in the United States should be permitted to continue to public colleges — and whether they should be granted discounted in-state tuition. The California Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a case over whether giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants violated federal immigration law.”
The foreclosure debacle threatens to have a serious effect on the economy as a whole, writes The Washington Post:
“The federal government's pressure on lenders Wednesday to fix the paperwork problems plaguing foreclosures left unaddressed a far greater potential threat facing the financial system and the U.S. economy.
“Beyond sloppy documents, the foreclosure debacle has exposed one of Wall Street's little-known practices: For more than a decade, big lenders sold millions of mortgages around the globe at lightning speed without properly transferring the physical documents that prove who legally owned the loans.
“Now, some of the pension systems, hedge funds and other investors that took big losses on the loans are seeking to use this flaw to force banks to compensate them or even invalidate the mortgage trades themselves.”
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, Hispanics are living longer than other populations. USA Today writes on the new study:
“On average, Hispanics outlive whites by 2.5 years and blacks by 7.7 years, according to the report. Their life expectancy at birth in 2006 was 80.6 years, compared with 78.1 for whites, 72.9 for blacks and 77.7 years for the total population. Asians are not included in the data.
“The report shows that the Hispanic population has higher life expectancy at birth and at almost every age despite a socioeconomic status lower than that of whites.”
Charter schools tend to perform better than public schools and some private schools, according to the Los Angeles Times:
“At their best, charter schools in Los Angeles shatter the conventional wisdom that skin color and family income are the greatest predictors of academic success.
“Setting standards high and wringing long hours out of students and teachers, the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to levels of achievement, as measured by standardized tests, more typical of affluent, suburban students.
“If such schools were the norm, any debate over the value of charters would be moot. But there is no typical charter. They adhere to no single vision and vary widely in quality.
“That said, a Times analysis showed that, overall, L.A. charter schools deliver higher test scores than traditional public schools. But charters lag well behind L.A. Unified's network of magnet schools.”