Governor Abbott, Republican of Texas, is challenging a Supreme Court decision that gives young people not “legally admitted” to the country education options beyond those American children enjoy.

In 1982, the court, in Plyler v. Doe together with Texas v. Certain Named and Unnamed Alien Child, ruled that there was no “compelling state interest” to denying any “person” an education, regardless of whether they had legal status.

Forty years later, that interest is growing more manifest, as the lure of education incentivizes families to enter America illegally rather than take the pathway to entry and, eventually, citizenship laid out in our laws.

The Texas comptroller in 2006 estimated that, in Texas alone, 135,000 students who had no right to be in the country were enrolled in K-12, at a cost of $957 million, and the numbers have skyrocketed since.

Mr. Abbott says the burden to educate non-Americans would soon be “unsustainable and unaffordable,” as the Biden administration plans to end Title 42 that allowed border patrol to send home citizens of other nations who’d entered during the pandemic.

In 2016 alone, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated 675,000 unauthorized children were living  in the country — a figure greater than the population of Vermont. Yet teachers’ unions who forever complain about money roll out the welcome mat.

More students mean bigger class sizes, and more cash they can shake out of taxpayers. So they ignore the price American children pay, both in resources and one-on-one time with teachers.

The New York Times examined this drain in a 2019 story titled, “Schools Scramble to Handle Thousands of New Migrant Families,” discussing how much time schools spend struggling to bring new arrivals up to speed.

That year, according to the Times, the public school district at Palm Beach County, Florida, enrolled 4,555 Guatemalans alone, many who were from remote parts of the country and spoke “neither Spanish nor English.”

 Non-citizens who break our laws, moreover, can pick their town of choice, while parents from, say, a poor or minority town have no ability to send junior to a school even a block outside their district.

In 2011, for example, Ohio sentenced a black mother, Kelley Williams-Bolar, to prison for enrolling her daughters in neighboring — and wealthier — Copley-Fairlawn, where their father lived, rather than her hometown of Akron.

In 1982, the same year the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler, I had my own experience with this sort of mentality after my parents moved our family to a neighboring town with a better school system.

Because they didn’t want to disrupt my education mid-year, they drove me back and forth each day to finish classes. One morning, the district called my old house to say they’d heard a rumor that we’d skedaddled.

When the administrator demanded to know why I was still attending class, my mother — not a citizen, rather a resident legal alien — denied the rumor. She cared about my education so much, she was left shaking.

We still owned that house in the district, and my parents would have argued that I had a right to be in that school, but we counted ourselves lucky that my mother happened to be there to answer the phone wired to the kitchen wall.

Teachers unions fight tooth and nail to prevent this sort of choice in education, and President Biden himself stood in the schoolhouse door, opposing busing alongside segregationists in the 1970s. Vice President Harris called him out on it during a 2020 Democratic debate.

In Pyler, the Supreme Court ruled, “Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage.”  

The superintendent of schools at McAllen, Texas, J.A. Gonzalez, who said of Mr. Abbott’s proposal, “When we look at schools, it’s about how are kids are going to develop into young, productive citizens that are in our workforce.”

What could be a more compelling interest than that?