Changing Demographics

Just recently, a landmark deomographic shift was realized in the South. The NYT carried the story below with supporting stats from Ed Trust. This challenges all of us to see that while education should have transformed already, in the face of a rapidly changing student population it simply has to if we are to achieve our shared goals of every student succeeding. KnowledgeWorks Foundation worked with the Institute for the Future to assess what education would be forecast (not predicted) to look like in the next ten years. One clear insight is that students will come to school with more "baggage" from the environments in which they live, not less. Are we going to blame this factor for low performance or transform the system to actually meet their needs?


Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
January 7, 2010
By SHAILA DEWAN New York Times

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 ethnic minorities, a report found...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html