The controversy over how the U.S. government will, should, or should not deal with the large number of detained immigrant children now in its keeping, will soon confront yet another sticky issue. Children means schools—and setting up schools for detainee children means making a host of complicated decisions and arrangements.

As it happens, we were involved in a somewhat analogous situation in Iraq in 2007 when the U.S. military found itself abruptly in charge of large numbers of detained youths. In an unplanned-for consequence of the surge, hundreds of Iraqis spanning from the age of eleven to seventeen were detained for activities ranging from placing IEDs to being on the wrong street corner during a raid. What to do with nine hundred captured adolescents? School was the obvious answer—but it was not an enterprise that fell into the natural competency of the military in the middle of an insurgency. The Department of Defense brought in the RAND Corporation to advise and assist with launching this unprecedented school. No military doctrine existed to devise a school for Iraqi teenagers just as none exists now when the potential detainees include even younger children who require education as per federal law. In Iraq, decisions made at breakneck speed, from planning the facilities to creating a curriculum, were rife with pitfalls and unintended consequences just as they likely will be in the current situation.

Obviously, there are important differences between these two populations. There are no hostilities between our country and their respective countries of origin, and these are not terrorists or suspected terrorists. But both groups are deprived of their liberty for an indefinite period of time, and their captors are going to be in charge of educating them.

In the case of the immigrants, strong arguments have been made against detention. Even the October 2016 ICE Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers Report essentially warned, “Don’t do it,” on the grounds that such a measure would likely be expensive and administratively tangled. But if the plan goes forward, as now appears likely, it’s obviously in everyone’s best interest for things to go as well as they possibly can. In that spirit we offer six recommendations, drawn from our earlier experience with detainee schooling.

1. Integrate the planning among agencies and stakeholders to the maximum extent possible. Migrant detention centers will involve multiple agencies and presumably outside contractors in addition to the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, Education, Homeland Security, and a host of civil society and human-rights groups. Each agency will plan with different expertise, values, cultures, and routines. Joint action is almost inevitably difficult, but prioritizing integrated planning will be essential to success. In Iraq, the Army Corps of Engineers readied the school facility in an impressive thirteen days, but the military culture of “stay in your lane” minimized consultation between builders on the one hand and the military and civilian education planners on the other. The educational plan divided approximately seven hundred detainees eligible for school into classes of sixty students each—that being a typical class size in Iraq. On what would have been their first day of classes, the juveniles arrived in eleven new, expensive buses, only to be turned around almost immediately and sent back to their tents when it became clear that the small classrooms would not fit sixty adolescent bodies. On the next day only 250 detainees came to school, now split into eight classes of twenty-three to thirty students. But this meant that each detainee would attend school only one day out of three, instead of the initially foreseen six days a week. This subverted the entire point of the school—to provide a consistent, intensive educational experience and stave off boredom. A gap between intention and execution widened in one fell swoop.

In the case of the immigrants, major problems are already emerging, with the government struggling to reunite children with their families as ordered by the courts, because information on who goes where and who is related to whom, resting with different agencies or even having been destroyed.

Division of responsibilities is fine, but there must be continual communication among the implementers, and an overarching coordination body to make sure the pieces all fit and make sense.

2. Establish and communicate a clear process for what the detainees can expect. For the detention experience to be bearable, detainees need a degree of hope—or at least clarity—about their circumstances and their future. This requires careful record-keeping, explicit information on the bureaucratic and legal processes that affect them, and a supporting infrastructure to ensure that these processes can properly be followed. In the post–Abu-Ghraib years, the U.S. military intended their treatment of juveniles to nourish hope and make the young men feel positive about a new Iraq. Given the circumstances, promoting hope was hard: these young people missed their families and were anguished to be cut off from regular contact. They worried that their loved ones might be dead, injured, suffering, re-located, and impoverished without their income. The military allowed them to communicate with family but the logistics were difficult. A misdialed number or changed residence could cut them off indefinitely. The Judge Advocate General’s Corps entitled detainees to six-month case reviews, which potentially could lead to their release. The detainees lived for this, but an incompetent or indifferent translator could destroy their chances in a flash, making it impossible for them to properly state their case. We urge planners to devote sufficient resources to keeping children and families informed and providing whatever support systems are necessary to make the process fair.

3. Review programs continuously to ensure that they make sense. In Iraq someone at some point jumped to the conclusion that most of the detainees were illiterate. Piled on top of that came a second bold assumption, namely that once they learned to read, the detainees would study the Quran and realize that their religion forbade terrorism. No one took the trouble to ascertain either the educational level or the degree of religiosity of the detainees. Instead, the military went ahead and organized literacy classes at great expense for the 60 percent of adult detainees who were believed to need reading instruction. A bit of research would have revealed that Iraq actually had a fairly robust education system, and a short survey of the both juvenile and adult detainees would have yielded a formidable number of university graduates, high school graduates and those who at least a completed basic primary education. Educated Iraqis, herded into a classroom to learn their Aleph Beit, could only conclude that their American captors were clueless. Even the least educated adults could generally read the Qur’an on their own, and at both ends of the scale—the deeply pious, and the secular, detainees found themselves baffled and even insulted at being instructed in their own religion at the behest of these foreign “unbelievers.” Even when all of this became clear, it was deemed too late to backtrack from a well-publicized campaign to eradicate illiteracy and spread moderate Islam—and from the expensive contracts behind it.

By contrast, in the latter days of World War II efforts were made to identify the better-educated prisoners and mentor them into future leadership roles in post-war Germany. But in Iraq, an image of illiterate detainees—cited everywhere by military higher-ups and thus in visitors’ accounts in the press—stood in the way of seeing them as smart and capable, with significant prior education and skills on which to build. In the case of the juveniles, this belief in detainee illiteracy caused the policymakers to budget and plan for education only to the fifth grade. In the case of the current detained immigrants, it is imperative to plan education programs on the basis of factual knowledge. Where are they actually from? What kind of curriculum content will be most helpful to them?

4) Listen to the staff on the ground and give them some power to provide inputs to policy. Staff on the ground often see an ill-advised decision coming their way, but are powerless to contest it. In Iraq, military administrators often overlooked or ignored ground knowledge, for example when creating a Ramadan schedule. Iraqi teachers were hoping for the usual routines: mornings at school and time to rest in the afternoon. This works well during the fasting month, when there is a large meal just before dawn, people customarily do whatever work and errands are necessary while the day is still cooler and their energy level is up, then drift into a period of inactivity until dusk and the next meal. But the newly arrived officer charged with making the schedule, in an abundance of empathy and against the advice of others who knew better, imagined that the afternoon would drag on endlessly for hungry youths as they waited for sundown and food. He decided to hold afternoon classes to keep them occupied. From day one of Ramadan, that plan proved mistaken. School started at noon. By late afternoon, the classrooms exuded lethargy, with most of the detainees napping on their prayer rugs while unhappy disgruntled teachers offered half-hearted reprimands. Communication between those who plan at a distance and those who are close to the situation is essential for the good of all. And there has to be a mechanism to recognize when a mistake was made, and policy to be adjusted or reversed accordingly.

5) Before launching a school and establishing a curriculum, carefully consider the goals. One goal in Iraq was to expose detainees to American democratic values. Without any experience of democracy (making choices, seeing that one’s actions matter, free elections), the democratic process could only be an abstract principle to a captive adolescent, even if he valued these ideas.

Many possibilities for the migrant children’s curriculum will rightly be considered. For example, is the goal to ensure that the immigrant children don’t lose time, and will be able to re-enter their old schools upon returning home? Or, is the expectation that many will stay, and that their school experience will support their future integration into U.S. society? Given the uncertainty, should the goal be a hybrid system? Can one at best aim for a “get to know the United States and spend some time constructively while you wait for your future to be determined approach?” This will require non-partisan, judicious thinking on the part of policy makers. In Austria during the Bosnian war, large numbers of refugee children required schooling. Their parents were insistent that as soon as the crisis was over, they would be going home. The Austrian authorities, however, had come to the opposite (and ultimately correct) judgment that in light of the magnitude of the crisis in their home country, these refugees would almost certainly be staying permanently in Austria. Consequently, a program was set up to integrate the refugee children into the Austrian public schools as efficaciously as possible—a wise and successful move, as it turned out. Today, the Muslim Bosnians consistently score highest on pro-Europe and pro-Austria attitudes and have done well in employment and economic standing.

To their credit, the military leadership in Iraq thought hard about what kind of a school they intended to run. Should it be an American or an Iraqi enterprise? Should there be a visible military aspect or should the school be an explicitly civilian setting? Two decisions, reached early on, specified (A) only Iraqis or Iraqi- Americans could teach; (B) no one in uniform was permitted in a teaching role. These were well reasoned decisions, perhaps optimal. But they precluded any chance of American soldiers building relationships with detainees, who were often of a similar age, based on common interests of sports, music and the ubiquitous, popular with all, Tom and Jerry cartoons. Military doctrine discouraged fraternizing, and language barriers were tough. Efforts by U.S. soldiers with a knack for language and a willingness to learn some Arabic were received very positively by the detainees, who also enjoyed trying out their English. This may have been a missed opportunity.

In the case of the immigrant detainees, it seems worth considering a heightened role for Hispanic American educators, youth workers and even National Guard members. But whatever the planners decide, they constantly need to monitor their decisions to avoid unintended consequences, and huge gaps between intention and execution.

6) Manage public scrutiny without interfering with or distorting day to day operations. This is how it worked at Camp Victory in the post-Abu-Ghraib era: Two weeks after the school opened, the world was invited in to see the fledgling enterprise. For nine of the following fourteen days, diverse opinion-shapers arrived in droves: the Western and Arab print press, Anderson Cooper, Martha Raddatz, U.S. congressional delegations, Iraqi politicians, the inspector general of the Army, the International Red Cross, and high-ranking officers from the Multi-National Force Iraq. Even Iraqi soccer stars came “to boost detainee morale.” Calculated to impress, these visits were choreographed to showcase the school as a symbol of America’s hope for Iraq and its benign treatment of Iraqi youths. Meanwhile, the war on the ground was bloody and the adult detainees at Camp Bucca were barely under control, which made the school an especially encouraging, heartwarming “must see” for any official visitor to the war zone.

These visits, however, cost dearly. No new school can withstand such scrutiny without dedicating substantial resources to the planning and choreography of visits. The military staff knew more about welcoming higher-ups than fine-tuning a curriculum, so it was no contest what got their attention. Day-to-day military administrators—already few in number by usual school standards—prepared meticulously for these high-stakes occasions, working out routes through the school and talking points timed to the minute. In reflection of international law in regard to detainees, these visits highlighted “care and custody” more than teaching and learning. Details had to be exact: staff went to great lengths to replace the old Iraqi flag featuring Saddam’s handwriting, lest some newspaper print a picture of this obsolete symbol hanging on the library wall. After almost every VIP visit, a new rule would come down—for instance, no more soccer on VIP visitor days lest the players track mud into the classrooms. It is possible to plan for Melania Trump to see a classroom and conclude that “these children love to study.” But the public and the press will be watching closely, alert for even subtle violations, which in turn will keep the administrators on edge and focused on appearances more than substance. Public scrutiny does play a critical role in preventing abuse, but in an adversarial political climate, no one's agenda is pure. And representatives of the administration are on the defensive, more concerned about avoiding bad publicity than about objectively getting things right. One solution might be to devote resources to a competent professional separate staff to communicate with the public and generate ideas, and to require the press to agree on pool reports to cut down the intrusions.

However this ultimately plays out, it is essential on the grounds of ethics, the law, our national interest, our image in the Americas, and our self respect as a nation, that the matter be handled efficaciously, fairly and humanely. There is no upside to getting it wrong, and every reason to exercise flexibility, common sense and good will.

Kathe Jervis is a longtime teacher and educational researcher, and a current staff associate at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

Cheryl Benard is a former program director with the RAND Corporation. In 2007 they assisted in setting up a school for young Iraqi detainees on a U.S. military facility in Baghdad.

Image: Immigrant children now housed in a tent encampment under the new "zero tolerance" policy by the Trump administration are shown walking in single file at the facility near the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S. June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake