Education Week inadvertently lets us know how PIIPPs ("pro-illegal immigration puff pieces") are born. The piece "Immigrant Grads Get Charter's Help" contains the following:

Educators at a charter school in California have gone to extra lengths to make sure that undocumented immigrant students who graduate from the school receive financial support to go to college...

[Mara Simmons, the vice president of education for the school] noted that passage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act by the U.S. Congress would enable many undocumented youths to attend college. The bill, which hasn't yet been approved by the Senate, would permit such youths who have succeeded in U.S. high schools to gain legal residency and qualify for in-state tuition.

I have a feeling that many of the PIIPPs you see are started by people like Simmons who contact "news" sources with heart-warming tales of immigrants who just happen to be here illegally. Some are made into PIIPPs, some are made into the one-sided reports like that above.

I suggest we all send Education Week a link to this:

[With the DREAM Act, Orrin Hatch] and his colleagues are literally taking opportunities and tuition assistance away from the children of citizens and giving them to illegal aliens... Supporters of this bill are unabashedly placing the interests of illegal aliens above American families who have paid taxes and played by the rules..."

Contact Education Week's managing editor Gregory Chronister at gchron@epe.org