The South Leads the Nation with Poor Kids in Public Schools
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 11/6/2007 2:00:00 PM
For the first time in more than 40 years, the South is the only region in the nation where children of low-income families make up a majority of public school students, says a new report.
“A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South’s Public Schools” found that in the 2004–2005 academic year, 50 percent of the South’s school kids became eligible for free and reduced lunch, and the following year that figure rose to 53 percent. This year, the region’s low-income student population climbed to a record high of 54 percent, with 11 out of 15 states in the South having a majority of poor students, the report says.
When it comes to individual states, Louisiana (84 percent) and Mississippi (75 percent) take the lead in terms of the number of poor kids in school, says the report by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), a nonprofit organization that tries to improve the quality of life for those living in the South.
Poor Southern students often don’t perform as well academically, and as a group, they receive the least early childhood education, the report adds. As a result, these kids often start behind in school and never catch up. For instance, in the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests for fourth and eighth graders, average scores in both math and reading showed that low-income students were 20 to 30 points behind.
While there is no single explanation for the current trend, there are three major factors that help explain the increase in poor children in public schools in the South: demography, economy, and history, the report adds.
In recent decades, many states have had a higher population growth of African-American and Latino kids, who “statistically are more likely than white children to be born into a low-income household,” the report says. Also, some states, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Arkansas, have had high rates of unemployment. Those factors, coupled with the fact that, historically, deep Southern states and Southern Appalachian states have had persistent high levels of poverty, help explain the problem.
“This is a crisis of first order of magnitude,” says Lynn Huntley, SEF’s president. “Transforming the public education afforded to low-income students—the new majority today—should be a priority so that tomorrow these students will not expand a dreaded ‘underclass’ with all of the negative connotations the term implies.”
