America Has Already Changed; It’s a Three-Year-Old’s World

The New York times reports that, according to the US Census, less than half of all three year-olds in the United States are white. Hold on to your sombreros, kindergartens will soon be overrun by these toddlers of color, and once that starts there’s no going back.  In fact, it’s a trend that we’ve seen coming for years.

Nationally, whites accounted for 58.8 percent of all school enrollment in 2009, (Brookings demographer William) Frey said, citing the new data, which measured enrollment from preschool to graduate school as of October 2009. That was down from 64.6 percent in 2000, a decline that came with falling birthrates as the white population aged.

Now, add to that the studies by UCLA and Harvard about our segregated schools, as reported in a recent article in the Columbia Spectator:

According to a UCLA study, American schools are now more segregated by class and race than they were in 1954, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision was made. A Harvard study found that, while only 4 percent of white students attend schools where the poverty rate exceeds 80 percent, 43 percent of Latinos and African Americans do.

Can you see the impending problem? Part of what we’ve done wrong is to act as if there are distinctions between white kids and children of color. Based on that we lay blame, and based on blame we turn our gaze. If that were a solution we’d all be better off.

What we’re beginning to realize (although we’ve know about it for too long) is that the difference is poverty. The children of poverty, regardless of race, culture or ethnicity, lag in learning. In fact research shows that the children of poverty learn differently, that their schools and classrooms should look and be managed differently.

Couple that with what we know about our collective three year-olds.  They’ll be entering first grade in three years; in eleven years they’ll reach the threshold (8th grade) where many of them will either drop out or continue going to school; four years after that they’ll be going to college or entering the workforce.

This isn’t a matter of a changing America; it’s already changed. The trouble is that our schools and educational system haven’t. We still teach as if all kids are the same and live in similar 1950’s middle class circumstances. We still fund our schools with property tax schemes that produce inequality. We still pay our teachers as if what they do doesn’t matter.

We can’t say that we’re running out of time now, because we already have.