New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation

Posted by on November 04, 2013

As the South goes, so goes the nation

A new report from the Southern Education Foundation finds that a majority of public school children in 17 states — a third of the nation — were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches in the school year ending in 2011. Thirteen of the 17 states were in the South; the remaining four were in the West. Poor students are concentrated in the nation’s cities, yet over 40 percent of all public school children in the nation’s suburbs, towns, and rural areas are also low-income. During the last decade, as the number of poor students grew substantially in all regions, public school expenditures increased, but at a markedly slower rate and with considerable differences between regions. Within the next few years, low-income students will be the majority of all public school children in the country. With unchanging gaps in learning, schools across the nation could become entrenched, inadequately funded systems that enlarge the division between haves and have-nots. No real evidence exists that a policy of transferring low-income students from public schools to private will positively impact this problem. The trends of the last decade suggest that schools and communities must address the primary question in American education today: What does it take to provide low-income students with a chance to succeed in public schools?

http://www.southerneducation.org/getattachment/0bc70ce1-d375-4ff6-8340-f9b3452ee088/A-New-Majority-Low-Income-Students-in-the-South-an.aspx