LOL Change! Obama screws another pooch. Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities - Dumb and dumber.
Leroy N. Soetoro
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 Economic 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.
--
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact, to
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel of New York's
million dollar tax evasion. Charles B. Rangel is still under
"investigation" by a "closed door" House Ethics Committee.
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