Monday, February 16, 2009

"Latinization" of Texas 1st grade classrooms?

According to an article written by Bud Kennedy in the Fort-Worth Star Telegram, Hispanic children have become the majority in 1st grade classrooms. Coincidentally, Hispanics would have become the majority even without the addition of a single student. Does this mean the "Latinization" of Texas has begun? According to Karl Eschbach, the official state demographer, "it's already happened". The article adds that in 1st grade classrooms across the sate Hispanic children have become the outright majority with 50.2% of the students. Not only is the Hispanic population increasing, the number of white students in classrooms is decreasing at an alarming rate. The Texas Education Agency reports that there are 130,000 fewer white children enrolled in school than 10 years ago. The obvious question is, what does this mean for Texas government? For starters, "Eschbach and the Texas State Data Center now predict that Texas will become predominantly Hispanic within 10 years, and that the current white population of about 11.5 million will begin shrinking". That will leave us with a state full of young children, the majority of whom will be Hispanic. Taxes? Education? To put in bluntly; the future of Texas depends on how well we prepare our children, and in this case, our minority children. Now facing Texas will be the challenge of getting these children not only through the 1st grade classes that they dominate, but getting them through college as well. As the population of Texas changes and grows the state will need to prepare for different expenses and also become better staffed to accommodate the new "majority" of the "minority". 


Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. Billy TFebruary 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM

    I'm in your class but I was cycling through some of the trash people have been writing about and came across yours. VERY GOOD POST. I would ask the question of how we are even supposed to get them through high school, because the drop-out rate for hispanics is very high. Will we need to start hiring teachers who are bilingual? How do we accomidate this challenge? Do we change the curriculum to make it easier to get through school? I will be very interested to see how Texas will deal with this challenge.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)