IGNORING THE NEW MAJORITY: EDUCATION REFORM BEHIND BLINDERS
Consider two maps—one using data from the 1860 Census and one focusing on public schools in 2011:
[1860; click to enlarge]
[2011; click to enlarge]
“A majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades, according to a new study that details a demographic shift with broad implications for the country,” explains Lyndsey Layton, based on the report from the Southern Education Foundation (SEF).
The data in the SEF report parallel in many ways the documenting of in-school segregation lingering in the South as portrayed in the HBO film Little Rock Central: Fifty Years Later and reported by Felicia Lee:
On a recent visit to Central High, Ms. Trickey spoke to a self-segregated classroom: whites on one side, blacks on the other. An African-American student apparently dozed as she spoke. Students