KENNETT SQUARE,
Pa. (AP) -- The cheerful sign outside Jane Cornell's summer school
classroom in Pennsylvania's wealthiest county says "Welcome" and
"Bienvenidos" in polished handwriting.
Inside,
giggling grade-schoolers who mostly come from homes where Spanish is
the primary language worked on storytelling with a tale about a
crocodile going to the dentist. The children and their classroom at the
Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center, near both mushroom farms and the
borough's bucolic red-brick downtown, are a subtle reminder of America's
changing school demographics.
For the first
time ever, U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more
minority students than non-Hispanic whites enrolled, a shift largely
fueled by growth in the number of Hispanic children.
Non-Hispanic
white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the
public schools this year at 49.8 percent. But the National Center for
Education Statistics says minority students, when added together, will
now make up the majority.
About one-quarter of
the minority students are Hispanic, 15 percent are black and 5 percent
are Asian and Pacific Islanders. Biracial students and Native Americans
make up a smaller share of the minority student population.
Education
Secretary Arne Duncan called the changing population a seminal moment
in education. "We can't talk about other people's children. These are
our children," he said.
The shift creates new
academic realities, such as the need for more English language
instruction, and cultural ones, meaning changes in school lunch menus to
reflect students' tastes.
But it also brings
some complex societal questions that often fall to school systems to
address, including issues of immigration, poverty, diversity and
inequity.
The result, at times, is racial and ethnic tension.
In
Louisiana in July, Jefferson Parish public school administrators
reached an agreement with the federal government to end an investigation
into discrimination against English language learners.
In
May, police had to be called to a school in the Streamwood, Illinois, a
Chicago suburb, to help break up a fight between Hispanic and black
students after a racially based lunchroom brawl got out of control.
Issues of race and ethnicity in school can also be more subtle.
In
the Kennett Consolidated School District, Superintendent Barry
Tomasetti described parents who opt to send their kids to private
schools across the border in Delaware after touring diverse classrooms.
Other families, he said, seek out the district's diverse schools
"because they realize it's not a homogenous world out there."
The
changes in the district, about an hour southwest outside of
Philadelphia, from mostly middle-to-upper class white to about 40
percent Hispanic was driven partly by workers migrating from Mexico and
elsewhere to work the mushroom farms.
"We like
our diversity," Tomasetti said, even as he acknowledged the cost. He
has had to hire English language instructors and translators for
parent-teacher conferences. He has cobbled together money to provide
summer school for many young English language learners who need extra
reading and math support.
"Our expectation is all of our kids succeed," he said.
Private
schools nationally are changing as well, seeing a smaller number of
white students and a greater number of Hispanic students in their
decreasing pool of children.
The new
majority-minority status of America's schools mirrors a change that is
coming for the nation as a whole. The Census Bureau estimates that the
country's population will have more minorities than whites for the first
time in 2043, a change due in part to higher birth rates among
Hispanics and a stagnating or declining birth rate among blacks, whites
and Asians.
Today, slightly more than 1 in 5 kids speaks a language other than English at home.
But
even as the population becomes more diverse, schools are becoming more
racially segregated, reflecting U.S. housing patterns.
The
disparities are evident even in the youngest of black, Hispanic and
Native American children, who on average enter kindergarten academically
behind their white and Asian peers. They are more likely to attend
failing schools and face harsher school discipline.
Later,
they have lower standardized test scores, on average, fewer
opportunities to take advanced classes and are less likely to graduate.
Duncan
said the disparities are unacceptable, and the country needs to make
sure all students "have an opportunity to have a world class education,
to do extraordinarily well."
As the school-age
population has become more nonwhite, it's also become poorer, said
Patricia Gandara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA who
serves on President Barack Obama's advisory Commission on Educational
Excellence for Hispanics.
Roughly one-quarter
of Hispanics and African-Americans live below the poverty line - meaning
a family of four has nearly $24,000 in annual income - and some of the
poorest of Hispanic children are dealing with the instability of being
in the country illegally or with a parent who is, Gandara said.
Focusing
on teacher preparation and stronger curriculum is "not going to get us
anywhere unless we pay attention to the really basic needs of these
children, things like nutrition and health and safety, and the
instability of the homes," she said.
This
transformation in school goes beyond just educating the children.
Educators said parents must feel comfortable and accepted in schools,
too.
Lisa Mack, president of the Ohio PTA,
encourages local leaders to include grandparents and replace events such
as a sock hop with one with a Motown theme that might be more inclusive
or to provide opportunities for people of different ethnic groups to
bring food to share at monthly meetings.
"I
think one thing that's critical is that schools and PTAs and everyone
just need to understand that with changing demographics, you can't do
things the way you've done them before," she said. "That you have to be
creative in reaching out and making them feel welcomed and valued and
supported in the school system."
Some schools are seeking teachers to help reflect the demographics of their student population.
Today,
fewer than 1 in 5 of the public schools teachers is a minority. "It is
an ongoing challenge to try and make our teacher population reflect our
student population," said Steve Saunders, spokesman for the Adams
County, Colorado, school district outside Denver that has seen a large
shift toward having Hispanic students.
The New
America Foundation, in a recent report, suggested teacher prep programs
have at least one class for teachers on working with non-native English
speakers and that education programs embrace bilingualism.
Andrea
Giunta, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association
who focuses on teacher recruiting, retention and diversity, said you
can't assume that teachers are a good match just because of their
background.
"Just because you speak Spanish
doesn't mean you speak the same Spanish your students are speaking and
communicating with," she said.
This comes as
the NEA, the nation's largest union, just elected an all-minority
leadership team in July. The new president, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, is
Latina, and the vice president and secretary-treasurer, Rebecca S.
Pringle and Princess Moss, are black.
In
Kennett Square, superintendent Tomasetti said Hispanic students in his
district are performing at levels, on average, higher than their peers
statewide. One recent graduate, Christian Cordova-Pedroza, is attending
Harvard University this fall. Cordova-Pedroza is one of five children of
a mushroom farmer from Mexico.
Cordova-Pedroza
credited the motivation instilled by his parents combined with access
to a variety of educational opportunities for his success, including an
after-school program that included tutoring and help with college
applications. He also was active in a Latino leadership club that helps
provides translation services in the community and participated in
summer programs at Penn State and Princeton.
"Certainly,
I had to work hard to get there, but I feel like at every opportunity
that I had a chance of participating in or doing that, I was always
like, `Yes, I want to do that,'" he said.
Nearby,
at El Nayarit Mexico Grocery Store, owner Jaime Sandoval, a native of
Mexico with six kids, said he's been pleased with the education his
children have received. His 9-year-old daughter, he said, wants to be a
teacher.
"She loves to read and all that stuff," Sandoval said. "She always has good grades on English and she loves it much."
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Online:
Kennett Consolidated School District: http://www.kcsd.org
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