Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
ATLANTA — The South has become the first region in the country where more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are members of minorities, according to a new report.
The shift was fueled not by white flight from public schools, which spiked during desegregation but has not had much effect on school demographics since the early 1980s. Rather, an influx of Latinos and other ethnic groups, the return of blacks to the South and higher birth rates among black and Latino families have contributed to the change.
The new numbers, from the 2008-9 school year, are a milestone for the South, “the only section of the United States where racial slavery, white supremacy and racial segregation of schools were enforced through law and social custom,” said the report, to be released on Thursday by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit group based here that supports education improvement in the region. But the numbers also herald the future of the country as a whole, as minority students are expected to exceed 50 percent of public school enrollment by 2020 and the share of students poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches is on the rise in every state.
The South, desperate for a well-educated work force that can attract economic development, will face an enormous challenge in tackling on such a broad scale the lower achievement rates among poor and minority students, who score lower than average on tests and drop out more frequently than whites. Four of the 15 states in the report — Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — now have a majority of both low-income and minority pupils. Only one, Virginia, has neither.
“This is the beginning of a very clear trend that has enormous implications,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. “When we realize that the majority of graduates of our schools in the long run are going to come from backgrounds with educational deprivation, it makes it imperative that schools be improved.”
School districts in the South are already struggling to adapt, but it is not clear which methods are most effective.
“That’s the question that Congress, the legislature, the Gates Foundation — everybody’s trying to solve that,” said Arthur C. Johnson, the superintendent of the Palm Beach School District in Florida, which has gone from 40 percent minority students to 63 percent in 15 years. Remedial programs, career-centered academies, and intensive teacher training have helped, Mr. Johnson said, but have not closed the gap in achievement and graduation rates.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Maryland have been among those states where poor and minority students have shown the most improvement in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. From 2003 to 2007, black fourth-graders in Alabama showed the most improvement of any state in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, though they still rank slightly below average.
In Tennessee, where many districts have seen Hispanic enrollment increase by factors of 10 or more, districts have scrambled to hire more teachers of English as a second language. In Mississippi, which has no publicly financed preschool, some schools have used federal money for poor students to prepare 4-year-olds for the classroom.
In Louisiana, a recent study has tried to determine which teacher-training programs are most effective. Districts are experimenting with ways to attract more experienced teachers to high-risk schools.
“We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools. “An affluent 5-year-old has about the same vocabulary as an adult living in poverty.”
More minority students in a district does not mean that classrooms are more integrated, said Richard Fry, a senior research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center, whose research shows that most white children in the South attend predominantly white schools and an even higher percentage of black and Hispanic children attend predominantly minority schools.
Southern schools are far more segregated now than they were at the height of integration in the ’70s and ’80s, a period that saw a narrowing of the achievement gap, said Gary Orfield, the co-director of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at U.C.L.A. The South has the lowest percentage of children in private school of any region, Mr. Orfield said.
Minority schools tend to be larger, have higher student-teacher ratios and have higher poverty rates, Mr. Fry said. For some education advocates, such correlations raise the possibility that politicians will be less likely to adequately finance public schools as they fill with poor and minority students.
“We have a history of providing the least educational resources to the students who need the most,” said Steve Suitts, the vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and the author of the study. “The people in the South have to be concerned about all children, not just their own grandchildren.”
On the other hand, Southern politicians are keenly aware of the need for an educated work force. Spurred in part by school financing lawsuits, more than half the 15 states included in the study already provide more state and local financing to heavily poor or minority districts than to affluent or low-minority ones, according to figures compiled by Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington. But schools often layer programs on top of programs without analyzing which are effective, said Daria Hall, the trust’s director of K-12 policy.
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