Learning Curve: Diverse and poorer

By Maureen Downey

The South has become the first region in the country in which more than half of public school students are poor and more than half are minorities, according to a report by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.

The foundation found that African-American, Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, American Indian and multi-racial children constituted a little more than half of all students attending public schools in the 15 states of the South by the end of the last school year.

“Most students in this new majority are also low income. These transformations establish the South as the first and only region in the nation ever to have both a majority of low income students and a majority of students of color enrolled in public schools. Four Southern states — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia — now have a majority of both low income students and students of color,” says the study.

The study warns that if the South fails to address the educational needs of this new majority of diverse public school students, “the impact on the region’s and nation’s economy, global competitiveness, quality of life and democratic institutions will be catastrophic. This is not hyperbole.”

Unfortunately, the South has been lagging other regions for a long, long time, and has always had a disproportionate share of the nation’s poor and under-educated.

Forty percent of America’s low-income people live in the South, and the region suffers the lowest educational achievement and attainment levels in the nation. And education attainment of its citizens in turn has a direct bearing on a state’s financial health and well-being.

In an April report, the U.S. Census Bureau noted that workers with a bachelor’s degree earned about $26,000 more on average per year than workers with a high school diploma.

In 2007, workers with a high school degree earned an average of $31,286; those holding a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $57,181.

When the Census data on college degrees is broken down by race, the implications of a future in which the South is majority minority are alarming: Only 20 percent of black Americans and 13 percent of Hispanics hold bachelor’s degrees.

At the high school level, the state has seen a rise in graduation rates, but Hispanic students, Georgia’s fastest-growing student group, have a graduation rate of 71 percent, according to state Department of Education calculations. Black students have a rate of 74 percent, while the rate is 83 percent for whites.

Clearly, a concerted effort is needed to bolster the education levels of the increasingly poor and minority students.

The demographic shift now occurring in Georgia will create strains on educators still grappling with how to teach even advantaged students to escalating standards.

Unfortunately, it may also intensify the push now under way in Georgia toward privatization as middle-class parents begin to feel that public schools are overwhelmed by the challenges of poor students.

To learn at the same levels of middle-class peers, low-income children need help and extra resources. They need an expanded pre-K program that will enroll them as young as 2 to even the playing field and prepare them for kindergarten.

They need the state’s most dedicated and talented teachers. Three years in a row with inexpert teachers essentially torpedoes the chances of at-risk students to succeed in school.

Too often, poor kids are written off by educators who blame the dearth of parental involvement, the absence of books in the home, the lack of a nourishing breakfast in the morning.

There’s no pretending that those challenges aren’t considerable. But they also aren’t insurmountable. Many teachers and schools find ways to succeed even with students who come to school from non-English-speaking families or who come to school hungry and without pencils and paper.

It’s a matter of matching expectations with resources. It’s matter of believing that these children can learn.

Mike Feinberg, one of the idealistic Ivy League graduates who founded the KIPP schools, told me a few years ago that he and his partner Dave Levin approached the education of their poor, inner city students in Houston as the final minutes of a football game in which their team was trailing by a touchdown.

“We believe that we can still win the game but we have to make every second count,” he said. “There is no time to waste.”

Unfortunately, that sense of urgency is not shared by the Georgia General Assembly, which has yet to address the changing face of education and continues to sidestep the critical issues of funding, early childhood and teacher quality.

“If urgent measures are not taken to enhance public education inputs and outcomes,” concludes the Southern Education Foundation report, “the South and the nation will have an underclass the likes of which it has not yet seen.”