Growing concerns about the academic achievement of ethnic and racial minorities have prompted school districts across the United States to adopt safe-zone policies aimed at creating a safe environment to promote students’ academic progression. Safe-zone policies are partially motivated by the 1982 Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe, which upheld students’ access to free K-12 public education, regardless of their immigration status.
In California, home to the largest immigrant population in the country, state law AB 699 was passed in 2017 “to protect students and ensure that, regardless of their immigration status, they may continue to take advantage of the education to which they are entitled, free from intimidation or risk of a loss of access to resources and programs that other students enjoy.” To comply with the law, school districts started implementing safe-zone policies. These involve prohibiting discrimination in academic, extracurricular, and free-lunch programs based on immigration status or race; restricting immigration authorities from entering school campuses and accessing student information; allocating funds to facilitate access to financial, legal, and academic resources; and training school staff to enhance students’ educational opportunities. Despite the adoption of these policies, their effectiveness has yet to be examined.
This study addresses this gap in the literature. First, we evaluate the effectiveness of safe-zone policies in supporting the academic progression of racial/ethnic minority students in California’s public school districts. We examine individual-level outcomes such as high school graduation and standardized English-language arts (ELA) and mathematics scores. Second, we investigate underlying mechanisms by analyzing the role of policy components in achieving improved academic outcomes. In our analyses, we account for the staggered implementation of the treatment and gauge the impact of the length of policy exposure while assessing the validity of a parallel pre-trends assumption.
Evaluating the efficacy of safe-zone policies is crucial given persisting racial and ethnic disparities in California and across the country. Considering the well-documented long-term impacts of education on subsequent life outcomes, including employment, earnings, health, and involvement in criminal activity, supporting the academic progression of disadvantaged groups is vital for social equity and future economic growth.