PDF: New Majority
White students no longer are the majority in Georgia's public schools and across the rest of the South.
A new report by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation shows that slightly more than half the students in the 15-state South are nonwhite. Two years ago, the foundation completed a study showing that most Southern students come from low-income families.
The area of the country stretching from Texas to Maryland is the first and only region to enroll a majority of poor, nonwhite students, the report states.
"This represents a major shift in our regional imperatives. It doesn't take someone with a Ph.D. in history to remember that, for most of the South's history, the government has had a deliberate policy of undereducating nonwhite students," said Steve Suitts, vice president of the foundation and author of "A New Diverse Majority."
"We have to have a well-educated majority of our students, and that majority is now nonwhite as well as low income. In this respect, we have changed the fundamental assumptions about who we should educate well and why," he said.
Tennessee's total student body remains 68 percent white, and most Southeast Tennessee and Northwest Georgia counties are predominantly white.
The report points out that one reason for the shift in demographics is the increased Latino migration to the South in recent years.
That migration is especially evident in and around Dalton, where the Dalton school system is a little more than 60 percent Hispanic.
"We have changed the way we teach because of our Hispanic population," said Amy Haynes, school improvement coordinator for Whitfield County Schools, which is about 40 percent Hispanic. "We're in the top five states in the nation for Hispanic growth."
Ms. Haynes pointed out that the 15 percent of Whitfield's students who qualify for some form of English-language assistance are the ones who have driven a change in instruction.
The district no longer pulls English language-learning students out of class for extra help but uses more of an inclusion model. Students are given extra materials and support from additional teachers in the classrooms, Ms. Haynes said.
"We have to use more visuals, more hands-on materials. I think we're well on our way to meeting their needs," she said.
Mr. Suitts said that one of the most troubling findings of the report is that the South's new majority often attend schools with the fewest resources and lowest per-pupil expenditures.
"They're performing the lowest of student groups that we measure -- graduation rates, college attendance, college graduation, state-mandated tests, (National Assessment of Educational Progress)," he said. "We have to improve these students' academic achievement if we're going to have overall success."
Neelie Parker, principal at East Lake Elementary School in Chattanooga, said the teaching staff at her school -- which enrolls a majority of black and Hispanic students -- often is mostly new, inexperienced teachers. They usually are the lowest paid, a fact that influences the per-pupil-expenditure ratio.
In the last few years, the turnover has slowed, Mrs. Parker said, but whenever she has job openings almost all of the applicants are new teachers.
Mr. Suitts said he is not completely sure how to improve education for minorities in the South because no state has a track record of sustainable improvement for poor, nonwhite students. He said he hopes the report at least convinces lawmakers and educators that funding and instructional methods need to change.
"First and foremost, we want to make sure there is a developed consensus that we do have to change," he said. "We don't have another two generations to deal with this. This report is important in developing a sense of urgency."