For the first time, there are more non-white than white students in American public schools
If you want to know what America will look like in a generation, look at its classrooms right now. In 2014, children of color became the new majority in America’s public schools. Over the last 20 years, the number of Hispanic public schoolchildren has more than doubled, and the number of Asians has swelled by 56 percent. The number of black students and American Indians grew far more modestly—but the number of white students fell by about 15 percent.
The majority-minority milestone has arrived in our public schools early—a consequence of white children’s overrepresentation in private schools and the relative youth of America’s black and Hispanic populations. It is not a fluke. It is a preview of a transforming country.
Demographers predict that non-Hispanic whites will make up less than half of the country’s population by 2044, if not before. This change will affect not just our workplaces and our institutions but entire communities the country over. It will also transform our politics—in fact, it already is. Donald Trump’s success in the Republican primaries testifies to the growth of white-identity politics based on a fear of an historical “other” upending the established order.
We live in a country where minorities frequently face worse outcomes than their white counterparts and where racial fault lines cut deeply through our public life. Right now, schools and school systems across the country are confronting a question that our society at large will need to answer in the coming years: Do Americans have the will and understanding to build a more inclusive, and less deeply segregated, nation? In many parts of America—urban, rural, and suburban—that will require a radical upending of the status quo.
We’ll have to overcome challenges old and new: how to educate kids who increasingly come from impoverished and traumatic backgrounds. How to communicate with students who speak languages as diverse as Spanish, Russian, Bengali, and Tongan. How to avoid mirroring the racism of America—our disproportionately harsh treatment of black males, for example—inside schoolhouse walls.
Schools have long been battlegrounds where broader political and cultural wars are fought, over issues as far-reaching as gentrification to the role of the federal government in local affairs to the treatment of gay and transgender individuals. But they also have a unique capacity to rise above the fray, engender change, and unite the divided. Countless schools—sometimes fitfully, sometimes imaginatively, sometimes successfully—are trying to forge a new path. In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, a school-based program called the Newcomer’s Center aims to educate refugee and immigrant students from countries including South Korea, Guatemala, and Somalia, over time equipping them with the language skills and confidence to transition fully into mainstream schools. The ease and grace with which children connect and support each other at the Newcomer’s Center, home to an ever-changing kaleidoscope of cultures and languages, should be a lesson to us all.
Our schools face two central challenges as they diversify. First, how do we train and retain educators to relate to students from a broad range of racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds? More than 50 percent of public school students are now low-income. One out of 5 speaks a language other than English at home. And nearly one quarter are foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent. Meanwhile, about 80 percent of America’s public school teachers are white—down from 86 percent 20 years ago—and more than three-quarters are female.
As public school students diversify, qualities such as empathy, self-awareness, open-mindedness, and understanding are more important than ever in our teachers—just as they will be for all of us in an increasingly diverse society. Teachers will need to have the capacity to serve not just as instructors but also as cultural brokers and social leaders, aware of their own biases, empathetic when confronting difference, comfortable with change.
In 15 years covering public schools, I’ve met scores of dedicated, inspiring teachers. But I’ve also seen educators fail to connect a child’s moodiness or fatigue to her homelessness and hunger. I’ve seen teachers devalue their students’ culture and language—arguing, for instance, with a child over whether the common New Orleans expression beaucoup (slang for “a lot”) is an actual word. I’ve seen them underestimate and undervalue the power of family in poor communities, assuming that low-income children come from broken homes or have unreliable parents.
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