Growth in School-Age Minority Population Signals Demographic Tipping Point - Brookings Institution
At some point in some far flung future we will all be some pleasing shade of mocha or something, but right now to too many people the color of your skin and who your parents are still matter more than who you really are. That improves over time as it has every decade since the sixties, and now we’ve reached a new demographic demarcation.
This past Monday the Census Bureau released its new statistics on the nation’s children and school enrollment, and it showed something momentous. For the first time since this annual data series has been released, fewer than half of all the children (49.9 percent) in the youngest age group shown, three-year-olds, were white.
Whites still comprised a small majority of four-year-olds and increasing shares of older ages. Of those three-year-olds who did attend school—pre-k and kindergarten—whites were still in the majority. (Whites still comprise 58.8 percent of students of all ages.)
Yet these statistics finally confirm the beginning of an oft-predicted trend—a truly multiethnic minority school age population that will continue to pour into our grade schools, high schools, and beyond in the coming decade. The trend is most pronounced in eight states and the District of Columbia, where the pre-k and kindergarten populations are already minority majority. In an additional nine states, minorities—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and other races—comprise over four in ten students