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 Hispanics and other ethnic groups, the return of blacks to the South and higher birth rates among black and Hispanic families have contributed to the change.
The new numbers, from the 2008-09 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 today 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.
In North Carolina, minority enrollment was 43.2 percent in 2008, and 50 percent of public-school students were considered low-income.
"This is the beginning of a very clear trend that has enormous implications," said Michael 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 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, 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 Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools.
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