PHOENIX (By Ed Montini, Arizona Republic) November 3, 2005 — My son was born in 1992 into a household where, luckily for him, his mom and dad spoke English.

That same year, a group of parents from Nogales filed a lawsuit against the state alleging that Arizona had failed to properly fund public school programs for kids needing English instruction.

It took years to work its way through the courts, but by 2000, when my English-speaking boy was in third grade, a federal judge sided with lawyers from the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, which argued the case, saying that state, in fact, had not adequately funded the programs.

Of course, by then the children who did not receive the necessary instruction in English were already very much behind children like my son. The state and the center agreed to a consent order that would create new procedures for assessing English-language programs and monitoring their compliance with the law. Since then, there has been some increase in spending, but nothing close to what the center or the court said was necessary. More time passed. Then more. Then still more.

In January of this year, a different federal judge ordered the state to adequately fund the programs again. Earlier this week, attorney Tim Hogan of the public interest center made the newspapers and talk-radio shows when he asked the court to freeze federal highway funding to Arizona until the state complied.

My boy and his classmates are now in eighth grade. Most of them are doing well and will be more than able to meet the state's AIMS test requirements, thanks to their lifelong English-language skills.

The thousands of kids who, since 1992, were born into families where English isn't the first language aren't so lucky, however. Many of them will never develop the language skills that are necessary to succeed, skills that every politician in this state claims to believe in fostering.

Which is odd, because each time the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest attempts by court action to force politicians to do what they've already promised to do, it is the center and its supporters who are condemned.

"We get the nasty letters, the calls, the e-mails," Hogan told me, "We won the case in 2000. I told the judge this week that the kids we're talking about were in grade school back then and they're now about to face the high school graduation AIMS test. And not pass it. It's easy for politicians to say things. It's more difficult to work through the problem."

There is also, Hogan believes, an underlying prejudice against the children.

"We see a common assumption that these kids are illegal," he said. "The fact is that just the opposite is true. More than 90 percent of the kids in the lower grades are U.S. citizens."

Yes, he has been told, but what about their parents?

Hogan points out that under longtime court interpretations of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a person born here is an American citizen.

Some people are trying to change this, to deny legal status to children born to non-citizens. Perhaps some future Supreme Court will reinterpret the current view. (Would that make them activist judges?) Either way, it wouldn't change the status of today's kids. American kids. Kids whom Hogan believes we either can educate now or pay for later through welfare programs or perhaps even prisons.

In plain English, Hogan puts it this way: "How many children already have been lost? How many potential Einsteins or Michelangelos are we talking about?"