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America's public schools are on the cusp of a new demographic era.
This fall, for the first time, the overall number of Latino, African-American, and Asian students in public K-12 classrooms is expected to surpass the number of non-Hispanic whites.
The new collective majority of minority schoolchildren- projected to be 50.3% by the National Center for Education Statistics-is driven largely by dramatic growth in the Latino population and a decline in the white population, and, to a lesser degree, by a steady rise in the number of AsianAmericans. African-American growth has been mostly flat.
That new majority will continue to grow, the projections show.
The shift poses an imperative for public schools and society at large, demographers and educators say: The U.S. must vastly improve the educational outcomes for this new and diverse majority of American students, whose success is inextricably linked to the well-being of the nation.
The enrollment milestone underscores a host of challenges for educators, including more students living in poverty, more who will require Englishlanguage instruction, and more whose life experiences will differ from those of their teachers, who remain overwhelmingly white. *
"We are talking about the kids that we historically have served least well," said Kent McGuire, the president of the Southern Education Foundation.
"Over the decades, we have not managed to reduce the variation in performance between kids of color and white kids, and we haven't closed the gap between advantaged kids and disadvantaged kids," he said, "so now we have to figure out how to do something we've never done before, for the majority."
This new era has been approaching for more than two decades.
And though the projected diverse majority will remain concentrated in major urban areas and in a handful of historically diverse states such as California, Florida, New York, and Texas, it is by no means an exclusively big-city or big-state trend.
Many rural and suburban communities have also diversified racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically, often as a result of immigration from Mexico and Central America.
Signaling Broad Change
Consider the Aberdeen, ID, school district, where Hispanic children made up 56% of the 823-student enrollment in 201112, up from 45% five years earlier. Mexican immigrant workers were drawn to the small, rural town for jobs...